Whitman's Drama of Consensus.

Abstract

In this elegant study, Walt Whitman's democratic, consensual idealism emerges for first time as truly central to his poetic achievement. Though Whitman's democratic idealism has often been dismissed as a blindness to political complexities of his day, Kerry C. Larson argues that poet was in fact vitally engaged in problems of preserving social continuity at a time (1855-60) when specter of disunion and fractricidal war grew increasingly ominous. Whitman conceived his poems as vehicles for social integration whose entire aim was to dramatize joining of many and one, speaker and listener, universal and particular without subordinating either term. For Whitman, poet's role was to be the better President, figure in whose person all contending interests and competing factions would be resolved. The importance of in Larson's title is borne out in his argument that Whitman's most memorable poems depict goal of consent as an active process, something to be achieved rather than merely affirmed. By way of making this drama vivid, these poems project a fictive audience or interlocutor which, in being invoked by poet, furnishes him with a partner in ongoing dialogue of voices Leaves of Grass both embodies and records.