Sherry Chandler

I began to develop an appreciation for Whitman last spring when I took Leatha Kendrick’s Advanced Poetry workshop at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning and tried, not too successfully, to write a poem in his style. Since then and especially during this holiday season, Whitman has been showing up a lot in my reading, as reflected by the postings here.

Difficult to read much Whitman or much about Whitman without a return to my more-or-less constant theme here: the disjoint between the idealism that founded the United States and the often sordid reality of its settlement and development.

Richard Taylor’s Sue Mundy is also in the mix, with its theme of failed fathers and the mutual atrocities of the Civil War, its reminder that Kentucky only seceded from the Union after the Civil War.

All this has sent me scrambling to find this old passage from Kenneth Rexroth, in American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (The Seabury Press, 1973), that has been rattling around in my thinking since I first read it years ago:

…In the latter part of the twentieth century terms like “The American Dream” and “The American Way of Life” sound like fraudulent propaganda or advertising slogans to us. They did not to Whitman. To him they were terms of a millenarian vision, an apocalypse in which every vestige of fraud or exploitation between human beings had been burned away.

…We forget that America was founded by, and for fifty years or more ruled by, radical intellectuals. As they lost power in the years before the Civil War, their ideas went underground and surfaced in dozens of secular and religious communal sects, all seeking the community of love, the abode of peace, the cooperative commonwealth. Whitman’s ideas were common currency in the radical Left of pre-Civil War America, all those to whom the Civil War would be an extension of the Revolutionary War and who would never realize they lost it…

In his introduction to American Religious Poems, which is really a hymn to Walt Whitman with a crumb thrown to Emily Dickinson, Harold Bloom says that Whitman thought the Civil War was won too dear. Rexroth thought the Civil War was lost or at least won only by John D. Rockefellar, Andrew Carnegie et al.

Whitman never lost his optimistic faith in the fulfillment of his American dream, but in the twentieth century it became increasingly apparent that that dream would never be realized in the society as then constituted. Anyone with a realistic estimate of the tendencies of that society would have known that Leaves of Grass demands a revolutionary change, but Whitman did not. It certainly became apparent from the Eighties on—with the abandonment of the objectives for which most men in the North thought they had fought the Civil War, and with the maturing of the Age of the Robber Barons in finance and industry, and the growth of an immense population of immigrant labor and Negroes who were shut out from the American way of life.

Possibly if Lincoln had lived, we would not have had the failure of courage that was Reconstruction. Possibly not.

But while we might not have won “liberty and justice for all,” we came to believe in our Manifest Destiny. The mission of the 19th Century bacame a mission to expand and spread the American form of democracy, by force of arms if necessary.

Sound familiar?

Have Coffee Will Write on the safety/accuracy of voting machines: They were certified…sort of…maybe

I See Invisible People on Time to Act my Age?

Joan Chalmers Williams on Wal-Mart to Offer Just In Time Children for Parents with Just In Time Schedules

Digby on Why I am a Liberal and a Progressive and a Democrat (Hint: pictures of Nancy Pelosi). Also For Nancy from Rox Populi.

And from Donna, Jerome Murat