Democratic Portraiture: The Political Aesthetics of the Individual and the Collective in Whitman's "Song of Myself"

Abstract

Examines "democratic portraiture" in "Song of Myself" in order to illuminate the ways that "aesthetics and politics" in the poem are not "two categories to be weighed against each other" but rather "one formational question about how to imagine and represent a democratic ideal" by "challeng[ing] readers with new understandings of representation (literary and political) and representativeness (who is the representative hero of the American epic?), which aim precisely to merge aesthetic-political projects"; demonstrates how such a reading of portraiture in the poem "brings all of these themes to life: Whitman's effort to represent and achieve equality, the relationship between literary and political representation, and the role played by photography and other visual arts in Whitman's poetry"; traces how, "by oscillating between the mass-portrait and the portrait-series, Whitman tried to imagine democracy in action while simultaneously enacting it in his poem" as he tried "to balance the mass-portrait and portrait-series in an overarching democratic portrait, with himself as its emblem."