“Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain”

Blog 3

Reading Whitman’s prose in Democratic Vistas feels kind of odd– a bit like glimpsing the “man behind the curtain” and realizing his magic is not in some kind of heroic ability but rather in the fantasy of his vision. There is no tone of sweeping inclusiveness here, no ecstatic rapture at the common man. Instead of a co-opting of the author with nature and generalized humanity like in his poetry, in his prose, Whitman rather offers a clinical assessment of the nature of American “stock personality” and of the American political system and seems to unabashedly conclude that they are both rather dull, even vacuous, not at all the great mythic athletic, vigorous, and beautiful images presented in his poems. Which brings him to the point of the essay, in which he points out, much like Emerson in his American Scholar speech, the need for a commanding American poetic voice that can rally its nation’s imagination, pride, and emotions, a moral sensibility with the same force and urgency as religion. He seeks a new modern religion in poetry and literature that will result in a unifying sense of nationalistic pride (morally, culturally, politically, and otherwise), and which will set out patterns of thought for an entire people. Thus it is perhaps unsurprising that Whitman’s poetry has such an energetic, elated, and vigorous quality to it– what he seems to be seeking, according to this essay, is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, where the archetypes of the American self he sets up poetically become a necessary means of conceiving the American identity.