Containing Multitudes:
Whitman, The Working Class,
and the Music of Moderate Reform
''Be radical, be radical, be radical; but not too radical, ”
-Walt Whitman to Horace Traubel (1880s)
Walt Whitman has an acute identity crisis within contemporary American
culture. On the one hand, Whitman is our bard who declares the United States a
“nation of nations.” Poems like “O Captain, My Captain!” are ringing calls to
communal memory and patriotic reflection. However, Whitman is also commonly
considered our earhest “modem” poet and exhibits all the trappings of this loose
title: rebelhousness, individuahsm in the face of the crowd, a daring use of form
and subject to purvey ideals still anathema to mainstream America. Whitman molds
to his situation and metamorphoses into what we want of him. On the Fourth of
July, he is our drum-beating patriot. In our moments of quiet doubt, he whispers to
our desires.
Undeniably, much of Whitman is radical. Beyond his unconventional form,
the poet puts forth an ontological argument which calls into question our traditional
understating of being and, therein, ethics. Whitman calls the U.S.” essentially the
greatest poem” in his introduction to the 1855 edition to Leaves o f Grass. He goes
on to argue that “in the history of the earth hitherto, the largest and most stirring
appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir.” To Whitman it is the
diversity of America which makes it able to “not repel the past or what it has
produced under its forms or amid other pohtics or the idea of castes or the old
rehgions,” but to “accept...the lesson with calnmess....” This unwilhngness to reject
the past in conjunction with a universal acceptance of the present is personified in
the American poet who is the “complete lover” of the entire “known universe.”
For Whitman, all that is, is holy and all that is here is transcendent. America, for
the bard, is the world’s ongoing poem about itself.
Though radical in form and vision. Whitman’s highly egalitarian ontological
and ethical system requires a unity and interrelation of many elements of early19th century American labor reform. If America is the greatest poem, then
everything within is, in effect, poetic. Nothing is to be dismissed or reduced. Even
judgment is within the poem rather than derived from without. All conflicts and
resolutions are, in effect, a product of the same poetic dynamic. Righteousness and
sin, freedom and oppression, the soul and the body are all just parts of the same