Song of Ourselves
Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
In the midst of a crisis of democracy, we have much to learn from Walt Whitman’s journey toward egalitarian selfhood.
Walt Whitman knew a great deal about democracy that we don’t. Most of that knowledge is concentrated in one stunning poem, Song of Myself.
Esteemed cultural and literary thinker Mark Edmundson offers a bold reading of the 1855 poem, included here in its entirety. He finds in the poem the genesis and development of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Whitman broke from past literature that he saw as “feudal”: obsessed with the noble and great. He wanted instead to celebrate the common and everyday. Song of Myself does this, setting the terms for democratic identity and culture in America. The work captures the drama of becoming an egalitarian individual, as the poet ascends to knowledge and happiness by confronting and overcoming the major obstacles to democratic selfhood. In the course of his journey, the poet addresses God and Jesus, body and soul, the love of kings, the fear of the poor, and the fear of death. The poet’s consciousness enlarges; he can see more, comprehend more, and he has more to teach.
In Edmundson’s account, Whitman’s great poem does not end with its last line. Seven years after the poem was published, Whitman went to work in hospitals, where he attended to the Civil War’s wounded, sick, and dying. He thus became in life the democratic individual he had prophesied in art. Even now, that prophecy gives us words, thoughts, and feelings to feed the democratic spirit of self and nation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Edmundson (Self and Soul), an English professor at the University of Virginia, reads Walt Whitman's 1855 poem "Song of Myself" as a blueprint for democratic principles in this speculative work of literary criticism. To Edmundson, the "most profound and original poem that America has ever seen" is the first American epic that nods to a unified nation of equals. Edmundson advances through the poem by its dramatic highlights, among them its catalogs of ordinary citizenry and an autoerotic love scene between the Soul and Self, and reads the sun as a symbol of royal power and Whitman as an "American Jesus" with an expansive vision to "worship our fellow American citizens." While Edmundson seems at home with literary images, the democratic theme he traces in the poem sometimes feels forced, as in a discussion of Whitman, Jesus, and the "rebirth of humanity" in America. Edmundson's democratic theme is primarily based on a sense of egalitarianism, which may leave readers wishing for a greater discussion of where the era's racial tensions and viewpoints over slavery fit into Whitman's vision of democracy. Whitman fans and scholars will appreciate Edmundson's literary analysis, but the political theorizing misses the mark.