Whitman, Walt

WHITMAN, WALT (1819-1892). From the 1870s through to the 1960s, Walt Whitman was a flashpoint for a variety of different groups within the American left, bequeathing upon a host of different leftist movements a poetic language and style and a tradition of exalting “the masses” and the wider working classes.

Whitman himself was a politically ambiguous figure. In his poetry, he combined countless streams of American writing, politics, art and religion to produce a unique queer egalitarianism and non-rhyming style that changed the face of American letters. His major poetic goal, realized in his magnum opus Leaves of Grass, was to create a poetry of unity for the United States, bringing together all of the countervailing forces in American life into a mystical and transcendent oneness. Many read this poetry as subversive and radical, but Whitman himself lived by the maxim “be radical - be radical - be not too damn radical.” In the antebellum era, Whitman befriended woman’s rights advocates and abolitionists, but refused to support them, and in articles in The Brooklyn Eagle regularly disparaged them and most other reformers. Instead, he elegized white democratic working-class New Yorkers who advocated for their own rights but were also explicitly racist, as was Whitman.

Indeed, in the antebellum era, Whitman disparaged both slavery and abolitionists, women’s rights and misogyny. After the Civil War, once he had begun to attain to the national fame he had sought throughout his life, the poet became significantly more conservative, befriending titans of industry and including elegiacs to industrial capitalism in the latest editions of Leaves of Grass. This did not stop many individualist anarchists from adopting Whitman’s poetry as their own as early as the 1870s, although their ranks were never large (for example, D. M. Bennett, Benjamin Tucker and Moses and Lillian Harmon). By the 1890s Whitman’s poetry sold so well that it sparked a national controversy, as conservative groups began banning his writings on charges of obscenity. Thus did Anthony Comstock of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice seek to ban the sale of the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass, and thus did the Boston people do so.

By the 1890s, moreover, his poetry may be said to have engendered a school of poetry of his own. This poetic tradition, which emerged alongside a distinctly Whitmanite socialist political philosophy, departed significantly from Whitman’s personal beliefs, while taking its images and philosophy to their logical conclusions.

Whitmanite poetry was marked by long stanzas, flowing stanzas without clear rhyme schemes romanticizing common men and women, homosocial relationships between men, and seeing in the mundanities especially of city life divinity and sparks of ultimate unity. A host of poets would write works directly in this vein from Edward Carpenter in Whitman’s era to, later, members of the “lyrical left” and then such writers as Alan Ginzburg and even Bob Dylan.

At the same time, Whitman found his most devoted admirers among socialists, particularly among the Philadelphia radical Horace Traubel, who recorded thousands of pages of his daily correspondences with the Good Grey Poet and turned his magazine, The Conservator, into the work of Whitmanite socialism. Indeed, first through Traubel’s work but then through a broad and transnational network of mystical socialists, a whole Whitmanite school of socialism was born. Indeed, Whitman’s poems deeply influenced such well-known socialists and anarchists, including anarchists Emma Goldman, Maxim Gorky, J. William Lloyd and Ernest Crosby; socialists Eugene V. Debs, William Dean Howells, Edwin Markham, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox; and the American naturalist John Burroughs. By the 1910s and 1920s, Whitman’s writings had become required reading among counter-cultural radicals and bohemians, particularly among the “moderns” in Greenwich Village, where his poetic and political lineage may be seen, for example, in the The Masses.

Whitman’s poetry also had a lasting impact on leftist African American writers, most notably in the Harlem Renaissance, despite Whitman’s blatant personal racism. Thus did such socialists as Langston Hughes memorialize Whitman across a number of different works, calling him the “Lincoln of our letters” and the poet of “suppressed classes.” These writers imagined him, within the Whitmanite socialist tradition, as a universal bard, speaking to the emancipation and inherent divinity of all oppressed peoples.

Moreover, even though Whitman himself both disparaged same sex relationships and free love, Whitmanite socialists were disproportionately interested in sex as a means of liberation, and many people interested in Whitman’s works were also very publicly engaged in challenging heteronormative marriage and sexual relationships. Indeed, men who openly engaged in romantic relationships with other men were disproportionately represented among Whitmanites, and many at the turn of the century celebrated Whitman as the force that had allowed them to understand and justify their sexual attractions. Most famously, Edward Carpenter, one of the most prominent socialist advocates for homosexual relationships in the early twentieth century developed a long, admiring friendship with Whitman and wrote a long book of verse, which would sell tens of thousands of copies among the broader turn-of-the-century left. This lineage of writers also included the British writer John Addington Symonds, the British socialist Helena Born and, later, in a variety of Beat poetry.

Whitman’s works would also become central to a host of mid twentieth-century leftist movements, including the communist movement, the New Left, Sexual Liberation, Queer Liberation, as well as the counter-cultural movement of the era known as the “sixties.”

In all, despite Whitman’s personal blatant racism, homophobia, misogyny and idolization of industrial capitalism, the poetic tradition that emerged out of his writings became one of the most powerful vehicles for the popularization of anti-racist, queer liberationist, feminist, anarchist, socialist and communist thought in the twentieth century.

Garman, Bryan K. A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Harris, Kirsten. Walt Whitman and British Socialism: “The Love of Comrades”. London: Routledge, 2016.

Robertson, Michael. Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Schmidgall, Gary. Conserving Walt Whitman's Fame: Selections from Horace Traubel's “Conservator,” 1890-1919. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006.

Walt Whitman: A Resource Guide. Library of Congress. https://guides.loc.gov/walt-whitman