Seery, John E., ed., A Political Companion to Walt Whitman

Abstract

John E. Seery, ed. A Political Companion to Whitman. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. x + 373 pp.In 1937 article entitled Whitman-Nationalist or Proletarian?, Gay Wilson Allen argued that Whitman's real roots were not national but international and proletarian: Instead of seeking for an interpretation of Whitman in terms of American frontier, Jacksonianism, or ideology of American democracy, he should be studied as configuration of world-proletarian movement. Perhaps under influence of F. O. Matthiessen who, in his major study American Renaissance: Art and Expression in Age of Emerson and acknowledged common devotion to possibilities of democracy shared by Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville, at same time that he banished politics to margins in order to focus on formalist and aesthetic qualities of the writing itself, Whitman we inherited from Cold War came to us curiously clipped of his and working class roots, his homoeroticism, and his communal vision. At time began writing Whitman Political Poet in 1980s, Whitman was regarded as primarily mystical and spiritual poet, writing under influence of Emerson and Transcendentalism.Over past two decades, however, theorists and philosophers-including George Kateb, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, and Cornel West-have turned with renewed interest to Whitman as serious philosopher and theorist of democracy. This literary turn among theorists particularly evident in series of political companions to classic American writers published by University Press of Kentucky over past five years, including most recently A Political Companion to edited by John E. Seery. expressed goal of these editions to illuminate ways nation's greatest authors have shaped America's democratic experiment.Whereas in past, Whitman's politics would have been dismissed as irrelevant, hopelessly quaint, and even naive, all of theorists in Seery's Political Companion approach Whitman as poet actively engaged in constitution of democratic citizenry and community. Seery organizes his Political Companion into three convenient clusters-Individuality and Connectedness, City Life and Bodily Place, and Death and Citizenship-which aim finally for Whitmanian fluidity of interpretation. first cluster begins appropriately with George Kateb's foundational essay Walt Whitman and Culture of Democracy, which was originally published in Political Theory in 1990. Kateb's essay pioneered in introducing Whitman as theorist in its opening sentence: I think that Whitman great philosopher of democracy. Indeed, he may be greatest, Kateb asserts (19). Reading Whitman's Song of Myself as a work in theory, Kateb focuses on Individuality in tradition of Emerson and Thoreau as central meaning of democratic culture in Whitman's work. Connectedness... emanates from democratic individuality, as Whitman perceives and perfects it, Kateb argues; poet's concept of individual as multiple, composite, and strange becomes means through which individuals are connected to others in democratic rights-based polity (20). In Kateb's view, this ideal of connectedness as receptivity and responsiveness within individual is not well illustrated by Whitman's notion of adhesive love, or love of comrades (37). The comradely side of Whitman, he avers provocatively, is not his most attractive because it not genuinely democratic one (38).Kateb's exclusive focus on Individuality as Whitman's major contribution as theorist contested and revised not only in subsequent essays within opening cluster, but by other theorists throughout volume. Responding to Kateb in Strange Attractors: How Individuals Connect to Form Democratic Unity, an essay originally published in same issue of Political Theory in 1990, Nancy L. …