Whitman and Dickinson

These very smart "Positive, Postmodern, and Conservative Comments on Walt Whitman" highlight some almost Tocquevillian insights of Whitman's--his affirmation of the great man (and of inequality), his acknowledgment of the value of practice and of the value of the ordinary. Lawler writes, "we can see that Whitman has taken with dead seriousness the poetic project Tocqueville laid out of reconciling the greatness of aristocratic individuality (which always depended to some extent on vain illusions that justified injustice) and democratic justice."

It seems to me that the great men that Whitman affirms--especially himself as democratic poet, and Abraham Lincoln and America (okay, great beings, as America clearly isn't a man)--are great only in the service of spreading democracy. For instance, in "O Captain! My Captain," Whitman honors Lincoln because he "anchor'd" the ship and "closed" the voyage. Elsewhere Whitman describes Lincoln's virtues: "honesty, goodness, shrewdness, conscience, and (a new virtue, unknown to other lands, and hardly yet really known here, but the foundation and tie of all, as the future will grandly develop,) UNIONISM, in its truest and amplest sense" ("Death of President Lincoln).

Whitman does argue for the development of individualism in order to complement the development of democracy. However, it is an individualism that is detached. This can especially be seen with regard to religion: "it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one's isolated Self, to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the divine levels, and commune with the unutterable" (Democratic Vistas).

I still prefer Emily Dickinson's urge for privacy and isolation (a retreat not from all society, but rather a retreat to the society of her family and friends) in her search for individualism (responding to the herd mentality that Tocqueville foresaw as a potential result of democracy):

MUCH madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

In this poem she points to the pressure to conform to the mass, the majority. The majority defines sanity as assenting, and insanity as dissenting.

I ’M nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They ’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Again, in this poem, Dickinson retreats from the "public" world, the mass world--"an admiring bog." Dickinson's response to the democratic mass is to hide (this is in stark contrast to Whitman's response--to sing and publish and be as public as possible). It's interesting, though--in this poem she articulates her desire to hide, and yet she doesn't want to be expelled or banished. She sees the best possibility for individuality in privacy, where she can develop her divinest sense, which the majority would reject as madness. Perhaps this is just an example of the withdrawal the Tocqueville feared. But I think it's also possible that it's a fitting withdrawal to local, concrete commitments. It's these local, concrete commitments that Whitman never seems to look for; his solution for uniting individuals is patriotism--love of American democracy.