"Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to
Shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and"
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
He is the poet of the self as well as of American democracy. He believes that only in a free society men can reach their realisation, so his ambition as a poet of democracy is to improve the quality of the masses, of the common people, but first of all, in order to achieve this, we have to improve the quality of life of the individual. In this way, his view of democracy is a spiritual one, his idea of a social and political democracy is harmonised with his concept of a spiritual democracy. For Whitman, people have immense possibilities and limitless wealth of latent powers for spiritual improvement, as shown in:
"One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse".
Walt Whitman, Inscriptions.
Taking into account Whitman's poetry, we should pay attention to Leaves of Grass, as it could be regarded as the poem which best expresses this idea of democracy. Since the first publication of the book in 1855, it has been a continuous and surprising collection of poems that took him about thirty six years revising and expanding the whole of the book, as for each edition, Whitman wrote new poems and revised the old ones. This continuous work on the book could help us to understand his view on democracy and to find, in case there is such, any evolution on the topic.
Whitman identified himself very much with this book and critics try to find reflections about his life in all the symbols of the poem. Obviously, there are many aspects of his personality in Leaves of Grass, but he also created the illusion that he and his poems were identical. As mentioned before, he applied all his personal experience to the rest of the people, focusing on the necessity of improving the quality of the individual and in this way improve the quality of the nation, of the collective.
The poet tries to separate himself from tradition and conformity, making and attempt to express what was for him poetic in relation to the life in America in the middle of the century; beginning with an acceptance of life in its totality, he looks into his interior life, using his senses -characteristic of Transcendentalism- and at the same time he looks at the exterior, at the democratic masses of the whole country through love, peace and gentleness.
The idea of democracy is not only represented in this book through its content, but also the form plays an important role in order to represent Whitman's idea of democracy. In Leaves of Grass Whitman tries to liberate poetry. He was convinced that he had something new to say and that only natural poetic form could express his vision. In this way he adopted the "organic view" of poetry introduced by Emerson. This theory is one of the characteristics of Transcendentalism, the literary movement to which Whitman belonged. This "organic view" establishes that just as the inner force of a phenomenon in nature determines its external structure, so the divinity of the poet's central idea or intuition determines the appropriate poetic expression. This implies that the inspiration for art comes always from the depths of the poet and that these depths take exterior form freely and spontaneously provided the poet follows the suggestions and indications of the created spirit within him. In this sense the poet is not a conscious creator. The artist gives prophetic expression to imaginative truths that find their own form.
Whitman, when using this device, liberates poetry in its use of free verbs. His poetry is a kind of poetry written without a regular pattern of rhyme and matter, so free verbs allowed him to expand the lines according to the emotions or the observations he wanted to express. In this sense, when it was published, Leaves of Grass did not belong to any particular accepted form of poetry, it was something new, a new form that helped Whitman to convey the idea of democracy he wanted to explain. In most of the poems of the book it seems that the poem did not pay attention to the form and the structure. This happened because Whitman believed that poetry should be created to be heard and not to be read; that is why he uses many musical and oratory elements. In his poems we can find a lot of apostrophes, rhetorical questions, aphorisms, parenthetical comments in brackets and alliterative phrases.
In order to give to his poems this idea of democracy and common quality of life he also tried to break away from the conventions of style; for him, art and life must not be separated and in this book he introduced many aspects that were not considered poetic. He uses the language of the streets, of the outlaw classes, colloquial speech, slang, idioms, localisms and also words that he himself invented. As a general characteristic, there are not many ornamental similes in his poems and he does not use much figurative language.
Apart from these characteristics, the technique he used most in his poems is the catalogue, that is, very long lists of nouns and descriptions which symbolises the process of democracy, trying to say that everything is good and important at the same level.
Whitman had a very clear idea of what a poet is. Also in this theory he is influenced by his own view of democracy. He visualised the role of the poet as a seer, as a prophetic genius who can understand, perceive and interpret his own age and also who can see beyond his time.
He thinks the poet illuminates the meaning of the universe and man's relation to the universe; for him the ideal poet is the poet of the individual first of all, then the poet of nature and finally, of God. All these elements, man, nature and God, are all united by the poet's harmonious visionary power in order to give the general idea of democracy that the book conveys in lines like the following:
"Spontaneous me, Nature,
The loving day, the mounting sun, the friend I am happy with,
The arm of my friend hanging idly over my shoulder,"
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
The poet is also a man living in the present time and although he is concerned with the world of spirit he also accepts science and democracy as the realities of the America of the nineteenth century.
For Whitman the poet must be a singer of the self because he understands the relationship between the self and the other realities (political, social...) and in this way the poet understands the great mysteries of life: birth, death, resurrection; so the poet, as prophet, as someone who reveals the mysteries to the rest of the people, rejects all creeds, traditional philosophies, churches and laws. He believed only in man's intuitive power to harmonise his actions to God. This point was of great influence on the American society, a society that gives a lot of importance to individuality, to the possibilities of improvement of the individual.
Even if the idea of democracy is crucial in Whitman's poetry there are other major themes that contribute to express clearly what was democracy for the poet. The themes of the self, of body and soul, nature and mysticism are also of great importance.
For Whitman, the complete self is something physical and spiritual. Man's individual identity differs from the selves of other men, even if it can be identified with them. Self for Whitman is also a portion of the divine soul, so whenever he uses "I" in his poems, he does so to convey a meaning of universality.
Whitman is also the poet of body and soul. He thinks we can understand the soul only through the medium of the body. For him, body and soul cannot be separated:
"I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
and you must not be abased to the other."
"I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,"
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
Whitman, like Emerson, thinks nature is divine, a sign of God. The universe is something full of life and meaning, something men can enjoy, so in his poems, he loves and celebrates all the elements in nature and he believes man is nature's child. Man and nature cannot be separated, nation and individual cannot be separated.
Mysticism is other of the recurrent themes in Whitman's poetry. For him is it the experience with a spiritual meaning which is not clear to the senses or to reason, so mysticism supposes a kind of vision into the real nature of man, something that is understood by one's intuition.
All these themes are the pieces of a mosaic that seen as a whole try to explain the idea of democracy that Whitman had; a personal idea, a view that regarded democracy as the only system that cared for the people, the only alternative for a country like the United States. God, the individual, the common people, the ordinary objects and some other elements create, in Whitman's poetry, a "mythological system" that tries to explain how The United States should be, a nation in which Democracy is one of the basic pillars.
2031 words.
Bibliography.-
Spiller, Robert E. Four Makers of American Mind. Duke University Press. USA,1978.
Warren, Robert. Democracy and poetry. Harvard University Press. USA, 1975.
