In its May issue, The Atlantic published what may be a new acme (or nadir) of literary hagiography, “Walt Whitman’s Guide to a Thriving Democracy.” The article, by Mark Edmundson, is one of some quite vigorously spurting celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of the poet’s birth. But Edmundson goes so far as to anoint Whitman America’s greatest poet, necessary for the country to “discover its spirit” after the Founders shaped its mind.
I fumed and fumed. Whitman is, factually, the poet whom ordinary Americans most reviled (inasmuch as they noticed him) in the days when the genre was democracy’s main artistic expression, and ignored with the most determination thereafter. One morning I even woke with the paranoid conviction that Edmundson had made his claims largely without reference to Whitman’s actual poetry.
But in looking back at the article, I found plenty of quotations: the bard delighting to be outdoors in various settings, enjoying fellatio (presumably indoors), contemplating with bliss his personal bliss over American equality, dazzled by the variety of the country’s activities: the carpenter, pilot, and printer ratcheting in alongside the lunatic being locked up and the “quadroon” girl being sold in a slave market. (He himself didn’t much like activity as such — but no matter; he had a compulsion to brazen out what he couldn’t rationally defend: He not only didn’t deny having sex with his tenant’s teenaged son, for example, but he also posed with the boy for a photo in the style of married couples’ portraits.)
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