Mark Edmundson. Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy.

Abstract

According to Mark Edmundson, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is an onanistic dream in which the poet, or speaker of this vision, is, among other things, angry at the sun. Although masturbation is his “characteristic sexual mode,” Whitman is distressed “by the fact that some, or even all, of the figures he’s fantasizing about . . . are male” (64-65). Later (110) Edmundson says he is “agnostic” on the question of Whitman’s alleged homosexuality. Whitman’s imagined “fight for democracy” in this volume—intended for “general readers”—centers upon his autoerotic encounter of Self and Soul and a “duel with the sun” (“There are millions of suns left”), which represents the patriarchal or aristocratic forces that continue to threaten the fragile democracy on the verge of civil war. The vernacular “you” in the poem is no longer primarily the reader, or “divine average,” but “another part of Walt himself” (17). The sun and the grass serve in this rather private, if not “New Critical,” reading of Leaves of Grass as the age-old opponents in the people’s war against kings and aristocracy. In this fight, Whitman was responding to what Emerson called for in his essays: “a vision of what being a democratic man or woman felt like at its best, day to day, moment to moment” (3). It seems that Thoreau might be the preferred Transcendentalist to get down in the dirt with Whitman and his omnibus drivers, not Emerson, who allegedly complained of the “fire-engine” society he encountered when Whitman took him to a restaurant in New York City at the end of 1855. Indeed, for all the Emerson that Edmundson calls upon in this monograph on Whitman, he seems oblivious to the Transcendentalist or logocentric context for “Song of Myself” and in fact all of Leaves of Grass. As we know and as Edmundson acknowledges, Whitman claimed that he was “simmering, simmering, simmering,” and that Emerson—along with opera and the King James version of the Bible—“brought [him] to a boil” (5). And just what was it that turned this mediocre poet/journalist/fiction writer (whose humble beginnings Edmundson exaggerates, ignoring the importance of Whitman’s having edited the Brooklyn Eagle from 1846 to 1848) into America’s greatest poet? It was the Emersonian idea that everybody and everything was REVIEWS WWQR Vol. 39 No. 1 (Summer 2021)