Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer 2002 | Page 148

144 Popular Culture Review however, present less a confusion than an individual and particular approach to the issues of the day. Unlike solidified partisans like Brewster and Walsh, Whitman’s approach to reformist issues was probably as individual as most workers or citizens in a republic where the noisy fringes of the political spectrum hardly represent the individual positions of the middling masses. In these years. Whitman’s politics represent his opinions on particular issues rather than a specific program. Whitman’s piecemeal approach continued into the mid- to late-1840s and the arguments remained elementally the same. Whitman’s novel, Franklin Evans (1842), written while he worked as a printer in Manhattan, was a temperance novel overwhelm ingly in support o f the nominally conservative W ashingtonian movement. However, he also published a poem (1847) while editor on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which echoed radical reformist sentiments: When earth produces, free and fair. The golden waving com; When fragrant fruits perfume the air; And fleecy flocks are shorn; When thousand move with aching head and sing this ceaseless song— “We starve, we die, o, give us bread...” When wealth is wrought as reasons roll. When luxury from pole to pole Reaps fmit of human toil When from a thousand, one alone in plenty rolls along; There must be something wrong. Also written during his tenure at the Eagle is a piece called “The Laborer” which echoed conservative reformers of the day: If tme unto thyself though wast. What were the proud one’s scorn to thee? A feather, which though mightiest cast Aside, as idle as the blast The light leaf from a tree. No: uncurb’d passions-low desiresAbsence of noble self-respectDeath in the breast’s consuming fire To that high nature which aspires For ever, till tis checked.