Democracy's "Lawless Music": The Whitmanian Moment in the U.S. Construction of Representative Literariness

Abstract

This essay explores the connection between Walt Whitman and the rhetorical uses of "representative literariness," as part of a "post-Kantian" symbolic repertoire of intellectual self-legitimation. My focus lies on American literary studies, where representative literariness emerges as an important critical concept during the construction of an iconic Walt Whitman, beginning in the 1870s, and culminating in the 1940s, when both Whitman and his "age" were refigured in terms of aesthetic modernism and became central to the idea of an American Renaissance. While the American-Renaissance concept lost its critical appeal during the 1970s, its underlying notion of representative literariness has retained some of its cultural centrality.

Whitman’s First-Person Plural

“…If it now seems natural to associate stylistic de-hierarchization with political freedom, it is partly because we have already accepted Whitman's program before we listen to his song. 9 The poem's speaker manages to consistently tread a line between strongly asserting a sense of individual identity (a brash "I" that some readers find too aggressive, too masculine, too self-involved), and an "I" that also opens itself up to a din of other voices and subjectivities. "One and all tend inward to me," he declares, "and I tend outward to them, … I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, / Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, / Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, / … I resist anything better than my own diversity" (Whitman 42).…”