Postcolonial Whitman: The Poet and the Nation in the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass

Abstract

Walt Whitman’s Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass is a text manifestly highlighting the bond between esthetics and politics. This programmatic statement, expressing Whitman’s utmost self-confidence as well as his faith in compatriots, has a double focus: poetry and nation. These two central concepts are figuratively combined in the opening part of the Preface where Whitman writes: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” (5). In other words, poetry constitutes the core of and, concomitantly, finds its own final sanction in the American sense of nationhood, as if poetry nourished the nation as well as received its own nourishment from the nation. Accordingly, the poet—or more precisely “the great poet”—inevitably becomes the spokesman for the nation and accepts this ennobling and empowering responsibility with enthusiasm. Poetry, so to speak, is both substance and metaphor, it confronts the tangible reality and exists in the imagination. Exactly the same can be said about the nation. Therefore it comes as no surprise that these two ideas appear in Whitman’s Preface in various conceptual configurations, allowing him to explore multiple dimensions of the American experience.