Joy Ladin

Yeshiva University

“WHAT I ASSUME YOU SHALL ASSUME”:

DEMOCRACY, THE FIRST LEAVES OF GRASS AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN

POETRY

(In The Poetry of Walt Whitman: New Critical Perspectives. Ed.

Kanwar Dinesh Singh. Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2009. 14-31)

It isn't quite the literary equivalent of Nostradamus, but it certainly is remarkable how much

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America seems to know about the future of American poetry

– particularly given his claim that, as of the 1830’s, "the Americans have not yet, properly speaking,

got any literature" (471).1 For example, Tocqueville's prediction that "formal qualities will be

neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose,

and almost always strong and bold ... There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great

variety and singular fecundity" is sounds much like Randall Jarrell's description of modern

American poetry: “extreme intensity, forced emotion--violence; a good deal of obscurity; emphasis

on sensation, perceptual nuances; ... experimental or novel qualities of some sort; a tendency toward

external formlessness and internal disorganization...; lack of restraint--all tendencies are forced to

their limits” (Tocqueville 474; Ransom 331-2). And Tocqueville’s assertion that future American

writing will reflect and respond to hunger for “things unexpected and new ... vivid, lively

emotions, sudden revelations, brilliant truths” seems to anticipate Robert Frost ’s insistence that

“[the poem] must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of

revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader” (Tocqueville 474; Frost 127).

In terms of poetry, the American literary scene did not begin to resemble Tocqueville’s

projections until the second decade of the twentieth century. But in 1855, Tocqueville’s prophecies

came to startling – though highly localized – fruition in the first edition of Leaves of Grass. In fact,

as Robert Adolph has noted, many scholars have found Tocqueville’s “famous prediction … of

the genuinely American literature soon to come … to be most applicable to Whitman’s theory

and practice of literature,” and Adolph’s inventory of parallels between Tocqueville’s theory and

Whitman’s practice demonstrates that “Tocqueville’s predictions [were] uncannily accurate,

especially for the early Whitman” (65, 79).2 Indeed, Tocqueville’s crystal ball seems markedly

more accurate with regard to the early Whitman than to most other “genuinely American”

poetry. While modernist and post-modernist American poetry is rife with the “strange”

language, how many other American poets fit this bill?

None of the single, nearly equal, roughly similar citizens of a democracy will do as a subject

for poetry, but the nation itself calls for poetic treatment. The very likeness of individuals,

which rules them out as subjects for poetry o their own, helps the poet to group them in

imagination and make a coherent picture of the nation as a whole. (485)

Given twentieth-century American poetry’s obsession with “I”-centered verse, this particular

prophecy rather spectacularly misses the mark – but it “uncannily” describes the practice then-

adolescent Walt Whitman would adopt in Leaves of Grass’ panoramic depictions of “the nation

as a whole.” The correspondence between Tocqueville’s theory and Whitman’s practice is all

the more striking, given that, as Adolph details, each man experienced and evaluated American

democracy and literature from strikingly different perspectives. Tocqueville was a social

scientist from another country trying to imagine a literature that did not yet exist, Whitman a

journalist, political activist and would-be poet who was an attentive, opinionated observer of the

literary trends of his time; Tocqueville worried about a “tyranny of the majority,” Whitman

about the shattering of the Union into schismatic shards; Whitman idealized democracy, while

Tocqueville viewed it skeptically, as a problematic but inevitable development.

Given such differences, why should Whitman’s verse fit Tocqueville’s predictions so

much closely than other American poets’? As we will see, this seemingly question leads to some

of the most puzzling aspects of the history of American poetry: the complete rupture between

nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas of poetic diction, and Whitman’s paradoxical status as a

definitive American poet who seems to belong in neither century.

Let’s start by examining the aspects of Tocqueville’s prophecies that apply to both Whitman

and to later American poetic innovators. They are not hard to recognize. Whitman, followed closely

by Dickinson, of whom I will say more below, represented the first tremor of what in the twentieth

century became an avalanche of “strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose” verse that all but

buried the mildly Romantic, conventionally Victorian poetry lauded and loved by nineteenth-

century American readers. Indeed, the twentieth century’s “Make it new” approach to poetics was

so pronounced that, as Janet Gray has noted, critical acceptance of modernist American poets was

directly linked with critical dismissal of their nineteenth-century predecessors (xxix). As

Tocqueville predicted, American “democratic style” became synonymous with anti-conventional

innovation, and most nineteenth-century poetry was erased from the American literary canon,

leaving only the idiosyncratic figures of Whitman and Dickinson behind.

Of course, despite the emphasis on innovation, which otherwise fulfills Tocqueville's

prediction that "formal qualities [would] be neglected or actually despised” by American writers,

Dickinson wrote almost exclusively in traditional prosodic forms, and many twentieth-century

poets, such as Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay, continued to use forms inherited from

nineteenth-century predecessors. However, those forms were “made new” – or, from a

nineteenth-century perspective, rendered strange and incorrect – by a practice that is also central

to the poetics of the most avant modernists: the incorporation of language that patently violates

the conventions of refined poetic diction. Frost, for example, infused blank verse – the height of

poetic refinement – with New England vernacular; Moore stitched modernist epigrams out of

"`business documents and // school-books'"; Pound studded satires with snatches of ancient

Greek and vulgarities such as “an old bitch gone in the teeth.”

In broadening the bounds of poetic diction beyond the refinement prescribed by

nineteenth-century poetics, American poets were rather belatedly manifesting in literature a

tendency Tocqueville noted in all American discourse: “The rules of style are almost destroyed.

Hardly any expressions seem, by their nature, vulgar, and hardly any seem refined” (480).3

Whitman’s stylistic experiments – the poetic language Whitman himself termed his “barbaric

yawp” – appear to be the earliest examples of this assault on linguistic propriety. The 1855

Leaves boasts bewildering collocations of vulgarity and refinement such as “This day I am

jetting the stuff of far more arrogant republics,” and brings together an unprecedented range of

dictions, from the “vulgarity” of “the prostitute [whose] … bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimply

neck” to soaring flights of Transcendentalist refinement: “I fly the flight of the fluid and

swallowing soul” (45, 22, 38). With the exception of Dickinson, which I will consider below, no

other nineteenth-century American poet mounted so frontal an assault on “the rules of style” that

conventionally segregated of refined and “vulgar” diction.4 But by the second decade of the

twentieth century, rule-threatening was all the rage among cutting-edge American poets. For

example, in his 1917 "Homage to Sextus Propertius," Pound, who found Whitman’s approach to

language crude, adopts an approach that, beneath the Greco-Roman bric-a-brac, is essentially

similar: “A new-fangled chariot follows the flower-hung horses; / A young Muse with young loves

clustered about her / ascends with me into the aether” (205). Pound’s fusion of refinement (here

represented by Classical lyricism) and “vulgarity” (the modern colloquialism “new-fangled”)

creates a hybrid that would have confirmed Tocqueville’s worst nightmares about the devolution

of diction in a democracy. According to Tocqueville, such linguistic miscegenation produces a

Babel-like breakdown in social and semantic order: “the origin of words is as much forgotten as

that of men, and language is in as much confusion as society” (481). Because Tocqueville

equates the stylistic segregation of refined from unrefined diction with social segregation of

refined and unrefined classes, he sees American diction-mixing as a symptom of democracy’s

dissolution of social distinctions.

But if diction-mixing had actually caused the social origins and connotations of American

words to be forgotten, Whitman’s barbaric yawps would not sound barbaric, and Pound’s

“Homage” would not seem studded with anachronistic slang. What we find when we read

Whitman and his twentieth-century successors is precisely the opposite. American poets

demonstrate an extraordinarily keen sense of what Bakhtin called “linguistic stratification”; in

fact, the “origins” of a term like “new-fangled” in modern vulgarity and commodification are

emphasized rather than obscured by juxtaposition with the staid, bas-relief refinement of the

Classicized diction that surrounds it.5 In short, Tocqueville was both right and wrong about the

effects of democracy on American diction. Democracy does indeed engender combinations of

words that transgress social distinctions between refined and unrefined diction. However, these

transgressions actually reinforce the stratification of language, highlighting incongruities between

words’ social origins and connotations.

Tocqueville’s mistake reflects his incomplete understanding of the sources of Americans’

diction-mixing propensities, which he saw as a byproduct of Americans’ class-confounding social

mobility: “Individuals from different strata of society have brought along with them, to whatever

station they may have risen, the expressions and phrases they were accustomed to use” (480-1).

Kenneth Cmiel’s Democratic Eloquence, a groundbreaking study of nineteenth-century American

language use, places the phenomenon of diction mixing in a broader historical context. Cmiel

argues that the American propensity for combining refined and unrefined diction reflects the

destabilization of the relationship between language and authority in the wake of the American

revolution. According to Cmiel, refined language was the accepted language of authority during

Colonial times; those who wielded social, political and economic authority did so in refined

language. Though refined language continued to be standard diction in upper-class spheres, to

post-Revolutionary American ears, refined language “presume[d] power and demand[ed]

subordination,” and thus smacked too much of aristocratic hierarchy to be an appropriate

language of authority for a democratic republic (45): “The fear of aristocratic overrefinement, of

using civil forms solely to maintain social distinctions, surfaced in many ways …. Literate

Americans were preoccupied with the illicit uses of refined language” (45, 46). But though

educated Americans worried that refined language tacitly reinstating anti-democratic social

hierarchies, “Democratic sentiment created contradictory cultural pressures” (56). On the one

hand, American democracy “encouraged rough, familiar speech” in public discourse that attested

to public speakers’ rejection of the aristocratic hierarchy refined speech implied and affirmed

their identification with the unrefined masses of the electorate. On the other hand, the

democratic process required broad diffusion of linguistic refinement, to broaden the number of

citizens capable of the eloquence required to participate effectively in public and legislative

debate. A political representative who only used refined language would seem anti-democratic;

one who used only “rough, familiar” unrefined diction would seem unqualified to hold elective

office. As a result of these contradictory pressures, by the late eighteenth century, Cmiel argues,

in America, “the traditional language of civil authority became unsteady” – so unsteady that it

wasn’t clear whether there could “be a language of authority in a democratic culture” (56, 57).

If Cmiel is right, though Americans mobilize and exercise “civil authority” through

language, there is no universally acceptable language of authority those Americans can use.

Americans seeking or wielding public authority must negotiate the contradictory imperatives that

demand speakers to demonstrate both refined eloquence and demotic informality. Those

pressures, and the rhetorical innovation that developed in response to them, are showcased in

Walt Whitman’s 1855 attempt to seize center-stage in American public discourse:

I CELEBRATE myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. (13)6

Despite the unseemly bravado of “CELEBRATE,” the first two lines’ intellectual vocabulary

(“assume,” “atom”) and carefully calibrated phrasing demonstrate a refinement that underwrites

the epistemological imperialism of “what I assume you shall assume.” However, the speaker

immediately abandons both his imperious posture and rhetorical refinement, swerving into a

distinctly colloquial communitarian pronouncement: “every atom belonging to me as good

belongs to you.” This downshift into the demotic – the very sort of diction-mixing that dismayed

Tocqueville – is a textbook example of what Cmiel calls “middling style,” a nineteenth-century

technique for negotiating the unsteady waters of American public discourse.7

Cmiel defines middling style, which “appeared in political oratory, popular preaching and

daily conversation,” as “fluid movement between high and low, refined and vulgar. Speakers

might shift from the formal to folksy … [or] merge refined and unrefined behavior in a single

moment” (58). Whitman’s “fluid movement” from “formal to folksy” in line three is “merged”

by syntax merges into a single, atemporal assertion. This middling maneuver shores up his

speaker’s authority by enabling the speaker to demonstrate the refined eloquence required for

authoritative public discourse (“What I assume you shall assume”) while maintaining democratic

identification with an unrefined audience (“every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”)

demanded by democracy. In other words, Whitman’s “fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and

loose” combinations of refined and unrefined diction – and those of his twentieth-century

successors – represent a poetic adaptation of what was, by the mid-nineteenth century, an

extremely successful oratorical response to the destabilizing effects of democracy on authority in

American public discourse.

According to Cmiel, by the 1840s, “all mainstream politicians accepted [middling] style”

(61). Yet despite middling style’s dominance in political and popular discourse, only two

nineteenth-century American poets – Whitman and Dickinson – adapted middling style to

poetry. Whitman and Dickinson are normally portrayed as the yin and yang of American poetry:

Whitman’s garrulous, overtly sexual male to Dickinson’s reticent, reclusive female; Whitman’s

emphasis on life to Dickinson’s probing of death; Whitman’s obsessive baring of self, soul and

body to Dickinson’s equally obsessive masking; Whitman’s overflowing lists of overflowing lines

to Dickinson’s dash-riddled concision; Whitman’s shaggy metrical liberty to Dickinson’s carefully

metered quatrains. But Dickinson shared at least one of Whitman’s defining characteristics: she

too made middling-style diction the basis of her poetics.

While Whitman’s exuberant middling fusions of “high and low, refined and vulgar” are

readily apparent, Dickinson’s middling experiments are characteristically more oblique, often

compressed into a single word or phrase, as in the closing stanzas of “Like her the Saints retire,”

an early exercise dated 1860:

Like her the evenings steal

Purple and Cochineal

After the Day!

"Departed" - both - they say!

i.e., gathered away,

Not found,

Argues the Aster still -

Reasons the Daffodil

Profound! (Fr150B)

The middling nature of this disheveled divertimento is hardly apparent until the interjection of what

may be the least poetic term in the English language: "i.e.,” a flagrant import from the “vulgar”

world of "`business documents and // school-books" Marianne Moore would later laud as poetic

source material. Though barely even a word, “i.e.” gives a middling cast to the lines that follow;

thanks to “i.e.”’s school-book aura, words which otherwise might fit seamlessly into refined poetic

discourse – “not found,” “reasons,” “Profound” – take on a pedantic, prosaic quality that jangles

against the refined lyricism of “Like her the evenings steal.”

But though Dickinson, like Whitman, embraced middling expansion of poetic diction, there

are crucial differences in their adaptations of middling style to poetry. Whitman’s long lines and

panoramic sentences showcase the “fluid movement between high and low.”8 Dickinson’s

gnomic notations so drastically compress middling effects that they are often imperceptible

without close analysis. In this respect, Dickinson is much closer to twentieth-century modernist

poetry than Whitman. Like the prosaic penumbra of “i.e.,” the full middling impact of Pound’s

“new-fangled” is only apparent to those who read closely enough to note its subtle vulgarization

of “follows the flower-hung horses,” the whiff of distinctly unrefined physicality (“hung horses”)

it communicates to that otherwise irreproachably refined phrase. Whitman’s middling effects are

much more pronounced:

My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,

They fetch my man’s body up dripping and drowned.

I understand the large hearts of heroes. (38)

The first phrase’s balanced cadence gives its homely monosyllables a distinctly refined

eloquence that is almost viscerally disrupted by the “screech” of the following clause. In the

second line, Whitman slides further down the scale of linguistic stratification, using the out-and-

out colloquialism of “fetch my man’s body up” to dramatize his speaker’s identification with

“the wife’s voice,” while alliteration of “dripping and drowned” slides back up toward the

refined oratory of the final line. Close reading and analysis magnify these effects, but unlike

Dickinson’s and Pound’s, Whitman’s middling movements are so bound up with shifts in tone

and perspective that it would be hard to read his verse without in some way noting them.

The differences between Whitman’s and Dickinson’s adaptations of middling style are not

coincidental; rather, they reflect an underlying difference in each poet’s attitude toward the social

role of poetry – a difference that turned out to be decisive for the later trajectory of American

poetics. At a time when poetry – even poetry by women – commanded popular attention,

Dickinson eschewed publication, cultivating a style even contemporary scholars find difficult to

penetrate (Bennett, “Emily Dickinson” 216). Bennett argues that Dickinson self-consciously turned

her back on the popular acclaim other women poets of her time achieved, and wrote, as she put it in

Fr536, for “Immortality” rather than “Time.” Be that as it may, it is clear that Dickinson

approached poetry as an elite, aesthetic discourse rather than a popular medium.9 In this decision,

Dickinson anticipated the course that the twentieth-century modernist poets, with their little

magazine venues and limited-edition book publications, would follow. While some twentieth-

century poets, like Millay, carried on the nineteenth-century tradition of popular poetry written in

traditional forms and readily accessible language, modernists turned poetry into a high art that

demanded and to some extent created an expert readership trained and supported by the academy.10

Whitman too defied nineteenth-century literary conventions by adopting middling-style

diction. But unlike Dickinson and the twentieth-century modernists, Whitman remained committed

to a distinctly nineteenth-century notion of poetry as a popular mode of public discourse – as the

“word en-masse,” rather than an elite aesthetic medium, and struggled his whole life to achieve the

mass readership he dreamed of. Since the early-twentieth-century institutionalization of the split

between poetry and popular culture – poetry’s retreat from mass accessibility into aesthetic

difficulty and academe – this has seemed like a quixotic goal. Though Whitman famously failed

to achieve the mass readership he sought, in nineteenth-century America, poetry did enjoy a

popular audience. In fact, from the 1840’s on, Longfellow’s average income from poetry

equaled his salary as a Harvard professor; in 1856 alone, Longfellow’s poetry sales reached

seventy thousand copies (Beach 37-8).11

In the robust mid-nineteenth-century poetry market, the few hundred copies the 1855

edition of Leaves of Grass sold – a respectable number for today’s small-press poets –

“amounted to the public’s rejection” (Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America 340). But hungry as

Whitman was for popular acclaim, his sights were set far higher. As David S. Reynolds has

shown, Whitman “dreamed of his … poetry having an immense impact on American life. `The

poets I would have must be a power in the state, and an engrossing power in the state,’ he wrote

in his notebook” (“Politics and Poetry” 89). The 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass makes clear

the breadth of public authority Whitman envisioned for poets: “Presidents shall not be

[Americans’] common referee so much as their poets shall,” he declared. “[The poet] is the

arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land” (iv). As these

pronouncements suggest, the first edition of Leaves of Grass represented a serious effort to

establish the performative authority of poetry in American public discourse – to use poetic

language to “equalize” a racially, politically and economically splintered America.12

Today, Whitman’s desire to establish poetic rather than political discourse as the primary

medium for “refereeing” public values sound naïve or even delusional. But according to

Bennett’s recent Poets in the Public Sphere, in nineteenth-century America, poetry “function[ed]

as a form of public speech” that played a “vital role … within the intersubjective framework of

the public sphere” (5). Poets of “every caste and class, region and religion” wrote frequently,

forcefully and with real effect on public issues of the day; “public” poetry was featured in both

national magazines such as The Atlantic, and small regional or ethnically oriented publications

such as American Indian Magazine, American Hebrew, Irish World and the Louisville Daily

Journal (5).13 In the context of this vigorous, longstanding tradition, Whitman’s vision of poetic

language that would be performative on a national scale represented a logical, if grandiose,

extension of poetry’s status as public discourse. Moreover, in the 1850’s, the period of

Whitman’s most intense commitment to poetry’s “equalizing” potential, Whitman’s experiences

as a journalist and politico offered numerous examples of the performative potency of language,

as Congress repeatedly relegislated where African Americans were to be treated as human beings

and where they were to be treated as chattel. At the same time, the bitter, never-settled process

of legislating the territorial boundaries of African Americans’ humanity paradoxically

demonstrated the ineffectuality of political discourse in “refereeing” the conflicts between states’

rights and national unity, abolitionists and slaveholders that were tearing the Union apart. With

the potency of language and the impotence of political discourse ever more in evidence,

Whitman began to envision poetry as a performative mode of public discourse, poetry charged

with “an engrossing power in the state” that could “resolv[e] thorny political issues by linguistic

fiat” (Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America 119). In this sense, as Reynolds writes, “The social

forces that drove Whitman to despair simultaneously opened up new vistas of self-

empowerment” (“Politics and Poetry” 67).

However, in terms of American democratic ideology, public authority does not grow out

of individual “self-empowerment”; it is consensually delegated to representatives by the mass

electorate in whom all public authority ultimately resides. According to Reynolds, “The basic

problem of the conflicting rights of the individual and the mass, to appear on many levels

throughout [Whitman’s] poetry, was resolved by poetic fiat in the ringing opening lines of the

1855 edition” (146). This problem does indeed permeate the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

However, it is not, and, given Whitman’s commitment to democracy, could not be “resolved by

poetic fiat.” Rather, Leaves’ “ringing opening lines” dramatize the conflict inherent in

Whitman’s effort to establish exercise poetic authority as “arbiter of the diverse” and “equalizer

of his age and land.”14 From the opening assertion that “what I assume you shall assume” to its

concluding declaration that “Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death is

great as life,” the 1855 edition asserts its speaker’s superhuman qualifications to equalize not

only American society but the very terms of existence (13, 95). Moreover, unlike

democratically vested representative authority, the equalizing power Whitman claims is inherent

in the person of the poet, not in an office filled by a temporary, duly elected representative. The

“great poets” envisioned by the Preface are not elected to their equalizing post; they assume it by

virtue of inherent superiority.

Though the Preface presents poetic authority as a fait accompli, Whitman’s use of

middling style suggests that he understood the paradoxical democratic imperative to

simultaneously demonstrate superiority over and identification with the mass you whose assent is

the basis of democratic authority. In effect, the first edition of Leaves of Grass is an extended

stump speech in a campaign for the office of Great Poet that the Preface attempts to establish – a

dazzling, dizzying display of middling tactics for finessing the contradiction between asserting

the absolute superiority that qualifies him to “referee” his nation and the absolute egalitarian

identification with Americans en masse necessary to convince readers to offer democratizing

consent to the authority Whitman claimed by “linguistic fiat.” In short, Whitman turned to

middling style not for aesthetic purposes, like Dickinson and the twentieth-century modernists,

but in an attempt to simultaneously equalize and identify himself with America.

As “equalizing” public discourse, Whitman’s work was an unmitigated failure. His

country never “affectionately absorbed” the equalizing values his poetry promotes or the

linguistic formulae in which it promotes them. However, America did eventually absorb

Whitman as a poet, posthumously according him the “centrality to American culture” and at least

a measure of the identification between poet and nation he asserted: “[R]egardless of whether

one today accepts him in his claim to representative stature, studies of [Whitman] have typically

gone beyond or through him to become analyses of American culture and society” (Greenspan

3). Though it never became the medium for reconfiguring social values Whitman envisioned, to

think about Whitman’s poetry is, to an extraordinary degree, to think about America.

Whitman has long enjoyed a unique status in American literature as “the poet of

democracy” – that is, as the poet who best represents and expresses democratic ideas and ideals.

When we recognize the role of middling style in Whitman’s work, we see that the “poet of

democracy” equation works in both directions. Not only did Whitman’s poetry express his

vision of American democracy; because Whitman sought to exercise public authority through his

poetry, his poetics was profoundly shaped by the pressures of democratic discourse.15 Alone

among American poets, Whitman used what would become twentieth-century modernist means –

middling-style mixtures of diction and perspective – to pursue a distinctly nineteenth-century

vision of poetry as a vital mode of public discourse.16 Whitman’s desire to exercise public

authority through his poetry exposed his verse to the contradictory pressures of democracy to a

much higher degree than we find in Dickinson’s or twentieth-century modernists’ verse. That is

why Whitman so uncannily fulfills Tocqueville’s predictions, which are largely based on the

assumption that democratic style will be shaped by the needs and characteristics of a mass

audience rather than the elite readerships modernists addressed. Whitman’s unique positioning

at the long-lost intersection of poetry and American public discourse illuminates what poetry’s

twentieth-century demotion to aesthetic discourse obscures: the degree to which the history of

American poetry has been shaped by the difficulty of formulating a democratic “language of

authority.” Despite their differences, as Pound reluctantly affirmed, Whitman and modernism do

indeed “have one sap and one root”: middling style, and the dynamics of American democracy

that inspired it.

WORKS CITED

Adolph, Robert. “Whitman, Tocqueville, and the Language of Democracy.” In The

Delegated Intellect: Emersonian Essays on Literature, Science and Art in Honor of Don

Gifford. NY: Peter Lang, 1995. 65-88.

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Holquist,

Michael. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Beach, Christopher. The Politics of Distinction: Whitman and the Discourses of

Nineteenth-Century America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.

Bennett, Paula Bernat. “Emily Dickinson and her American Woman poet peers.” In

Martin, Wendy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Cambridge,

MA: Cambridge UP, 2002.

----. Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s

Poetry 1800-1900. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.

Bruns, Gerald. "Stevens Without Epistemology." In Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of

Modernism. NY: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Cmiel, Kenneth. Democratic Eloquence: The fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-

Century America. NY: William Morrow, 1990.

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition. Ed. R.W. Franklin.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Frost, Robert. Robert Frost on Writing. Ed. Elaine Barry. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP,

1973.

Gray, Janet, ed. She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century.

Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997.

Greenspan, Ezra. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Ladin, Jay. “`So Anthracite – to live: Emily Dickinson and American Literary History.”

The Emily Dickinson Journal. 13.1 (2004): 19-50.

Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Pound, Ezra. Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New

Directions, 1971.

Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941.

Reynolds, David S. “Politics and Poetry: Leaves of Grass and the Social Crisis of the

1850s.” In The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman. Ed. Ezra Greenspan.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

----. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. NY: Knopf, 1995.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Trans. George Lawrence. Ed. J.P.

Mayer. NY: Harper & Row, 1969.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass (1855 Edition). Whitman Archive. Accessed June 15,

2005. www.whitmanarchive.org/works.

NOTES

1 There were, of course, American writers, but in Tocqueville's estimation, most were "English in origin and, notably, in ways of thought" (471). Interestingly, given Whitman’s primary vocation during the years leading up to Leaves of Grass, Tocqueville makes an exception to this dismissal: “Only the journalists strike me as truly American … [and] speak their country’s language.”

2 See especially pages 78 through 82. Adolph examines the differences between Tocqueville’s and Whitman’s views of language and democracy with equal perspicacity elsewhere in his essay.

3 As Tocqueville himself points out, his sense of the American propensity to “mix their styles in an odd way” was shared by English observers (478). Kenneth Cmiel notes that many “European visitors were fascinated by the way Americans self-confidently slid from the refined to the coarse” (58).

4 Some nineteenth-century verse, such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Aunt Chloe” poems, was written in vernacular English. However, these poems reinforced rather than threatening the lines between refined and non-refined language, using non-refined language to reflect the lower (than the poems’ presumed readers) social position of their first-prreson speakers – a practice that directly presages developments in twentieth-century American poetry, when “persona” poems thatevoked the subject positions of speakers through vernacularity became a popular genre.

5 Gerald Bruns has gone so far as to claim that American poetry is inherently heteroglossic, that we cannot read most American poets without ears attuned with Bakhtinian precision to their "many-layered discourse of contrary voices in diverse tongues, each expressing its own `socio-ideological' outlook" (30). I would take Bruns’ claim even farther than he does, for I see his exclusion of Stevens' work from this "heteroglot" American poetics as reflecting a too-narrow definition of heteroglossia.

6 I want to focus on the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass for several reasons. As Adolph points out, it is in early Whitman that practice corresponds most directly with Tocquevillian prognostication. More importantly, the 1855 edition was written in the full flush of Whitman’s confidence that America would embrace his poetics – and that his poetics would command performative authority in American public discourse.

7 While Cmiel discusses middling style as a cultural phenomenon that extended far beyond political discourse, he locates its origins in the need for a democratically acceptable language of authority.

8 Several of Whitman’s contemporary reviewers remarked on his mixtures of diction. But by transplanting middling style from oratory to writing – and to a form of writing, poetry, that foregrounds language – Whitman intensified and defamiliarized middling style’s effects, so that even contemporaries who reflected on his combinations of diverse modes of diction did not connect Whitman’s style with that of middling orators. 9 I discuss Dickinson’s peculiar position vis a vis her nineteenth-century peers and her twentieth-century modernist successors in “`So Anthracite – to live: Emily Dickinson and American Literary History.”

10 While modernist American poetry comprises a much wider range of difficulty than is often acknowledged, as anyone whohas taught the subject knows, even a relatively simple poem like William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” is mystifying to the uninitiated. Robert Frost, of course, is another story – which is why he is often excluded from the modernist canon. As Frank Lentricchia has pointed out, Frost tried to have it both ways – to write poetry that would offer the mass accessibility of nineteenth-century poetry to “unrefined” readers and modernist complexity to connoisseurs.

11 By comparison, despite the vast increase in the American book market over the past 150 years, few volumes of contemporary verse ever sell more than a couple of thousand.

12 Reynolds’ foregrounding of Whitman’s efforts to use poetry to intervene in American politics is unusual among Whitman scholars. Even Betsy Erkkila’s Whitman the Political Poet, a self-proclaimed attempt to push the political aspects of Whitman’s poetics to the forefront of critical discussion, downplays Whitman’s ambitions to exercise public influence through his poetry: “His assertion … that poets rather than presidents will become the `common referee’ of the nation is … uttered at a time when the poet was becoming increasingly marginalized” (11). While Erkkila insists on critical recognitionof Whitman’s poetry as an outgrowth and an expression of his political engagements and investments, she as this historically inaccurate comment suggests, she shies away from taking seriously Whitman’s stated ambitions for poets to exercise authority in American public discourse, presenting Leaves of Grass as symbolic rather than performative language.

13 While Bennett’s study focuses on women, public poetry was widely published by writers of both genders. For example, Reynolds notes that Daniel Webster’s “momentous speech before the Senate … supporting the fugitive slave law prompted poetic polemics by Whitman, Whittier, and Longfellow, among others (Walt Whitman’s America 128-9).

14 Whitman’s critics have a tendency to overlook this conflict, and thus Whitman’s middling strategies for defusing it. For example, Reynolds states that Whitman’s “I” asserts both “total equality with others” and “total control” (Walt Whitman’s America 326). Most critics have followed Whitman in reading his poetry as quintessentially democratic while overlooking the unilateral, distinctly undemocratic authority his speaker often assumes. 15

While many scholars, particularly in the past two decades, have examined the ways in which Whitman’s poetry reflects his political engagement, far less attention has been paid to how Whitman’s ambition to exercise “equalizing” authority through his verse shaped his poetics.

16 Of course, some modernist poems – Pound’s later “Cantos,” for example – do address national issues. However, the authority that such poems assume is not public but literary. Pound railed against usura in the midst of verses whose polyglot technique and dizzying range of reference continue to daunt all but the most devoted and sophisticated readers – readers who recognize Pound’s stature as a poet, regardless of what they think of his politics. It is also true that many post-nineteenth century poets, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Amiri Baraka, wrote and continue to write “public” poems in accessible, non-modernist modes. Though these poems are direct descendants of the nineteenth-century tradition of poetry as public discourse, they did not and do not enjoy the attention their predecessors received before poetry became marginalized as an essentially high cultural discourse.