Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy

Edmundson (Self and Soul), an English professor at the University of Virginia, reads Walt Whitman’s 1855 poem “Song of Myself” as a blueprint for democratic principles in this speculative work of literary criticism. To Edmundson, the “most profound and original poem that America has ever seen” is the first American epic that nods to a unified nation of equals. Edmundson advances through the poem by its dramatic highlights, among them its catalogs of ordinary citizenry and an autoerotic love scene between the Soul and Self, and reads the sun as a symbol of royal power and Whitman as an “American Jesus” with an expansive vision to “worship our fellow American citizens.” While Edmundson seems at home with literary images, the democratic theme he traces in the poem sometimes feels forced, as in a discussion of Whitman, Jesus, and the “rebirth of humanity” in America. Edmundson’s democratic theme is primarily based on a sense of egalitarianism, which may leave readers wishing for a greater discussion of where the era’s racial tensions and viewpoints over slavery fit into Whitman’s vision of democracy. Whitman fans and scholars will appreciate Edmundson’s literary analysis, but the political theorizing misses the mark. (Apr.)