Abstract
This short essay analyses British socialist readings of Walt Whitman’s ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’ and explores some of the ways in which the poem was appropriated for the socialist movement. Despite its overt American nationalism, ‘Pioneers’ was one of the key Whitman poems for British socialists: extracts were frequently reprinted in socialist newspapers and periodicals, it was referred to in articles and obituaries, and it was invoked in speeches. It was assimilated into a familiar <em>fin de siècle </em>socialist spiritual discourse and used directly as political propaganda. This paper discusses the means by which the ‘Americanness’ of ‘Pioneers’ was either overlooked or actively edited out and its militaristic components were emphasised. By focusing on the martial imagery and rhetoric of ‘Pioneers’, nineteenth-century British socialists were able to translate Whitman’s call to America into a rallying cry for the extension of a global socialist democracy.
Highlights
First published in Drum-Taps less than a month after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’ (1865) has often, and with good reason, been read in the context of national reconstruction after the American Civil War
Whitman employs the rhetoric of manifest destiny and expansionism as a unifying strategy to counter the perceived threat of disunion and division to the American democratic ideal: the development of western America is presented as a common goal able to heal the nation’s wounds after the Civil War
In ‘Pioneers’ the myth of the west, so embedded in the development of the United States, functions as a continuum linking the past to the future; expansionism encompasses both tradition and potential
Summary
First published in Drum-Taps less than a month after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers!’ (1865) has often, and with good reason, been read in the context of national reconstruction after the American Civil War.
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