Aisthesis      Volume 9,  20188

“I Hear America Singing”: The Relationship Between 
American Religion and Democratic Values in Whitman’s 
Leaves of Grass

by David Mudd

Ezra Pound, one of America’s most famous poets 
despite his confused relationship with the country, 
once declared that above all Walt Whitman was 
“America’s poet…He is America” (Pound). Whitman’s 
work warrants such high praise; since 1855, readers 
and writers everywhere have recognized his poetry 
as some of the most important ever produced on 
the American continents, representing an important 
break from the more traditional poetry of structured 
meter in the first steps towards modernism. 
Whitman’s influence on American writers is no less 
palpable. Alongside Pound, literary critic Harold 
Bloom cites Whitman as the precursor and forebear 
of Allen Ginsberg, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, 
Pablo Neruda, and William Carlos Williams, 
declaring him the “center of the American canon” 
(Bloom 248). While his groundbreaking status in 
poetry is somewhat overstated, Whitman’s poetic 
innovations were just as important to the American 
tradition as the remarkable image of that culture he 
painted, called by Kenneth Rexroth, “the last and 
greatest vision of the American potential” (qtd. in 
Rorty 17). This vision, part of an Enlightenment 
tradition he was both working inside of and 
responding to, has continued to influence the liberal 
democratic political culture he inhabited. Whitman’s 
occupations and status were fitting for someone 
Henry David Thoreau described as “apparently the 
greatest democrat the world has ever seen” (qtd. in 
Kateb 19). Gone were the leisure-class poets of the 
British tradition; Whitman was a man of the people. 
As a journalist, he sought out the stories and the 
everyday goings-on amongst the people of New York 
City, and his poems reflect this inclination towards 
community, glorifying the common people and 
the many confusing multitudes that flowed around 
him. It was a fitting topic for a man whose internal 
conflict and contradictory identity he frequently hid 
behind the persona of “Walt Whitman, a kosmos.” 
Most likely, this was in no small part to conceal a 
sexual orientation that would cause the public to 

revile him. But it is precisely these multitudes, his 
internal contradictions, his dialectic of merging and 
becoming that make him such an emblematic figure 
for a frequently contradictory and often embattled, 
but essentially democratic, society. 

These characteristics, universal throughout 
his work, speak to a broader culture of American 
exceptionalism that celebrates the triumph of 
democracy and looks forward towards its role in 
changing the world. Whitman’s attitude towards 
America and its role in the world has firm roots in 
the American self-identity that many Americans buy 
into to a greater or lesser degree. Americans reading 
his work can experience the same transcendent 
feelings of celebration and the inherent virtue of 
republican government in much the same manner 
as Memorial Day celebrations, Independence Day 
fireworks, and grandiose paintings of the Founding 
Fathers or the Battle of Gettysburg. Lacking a better 
word to describe the sensation, this “tingly” feeling 
of heightened emotional awareness and increased 
connection recalls the power of religious solemnities. 

The connection between American identity 
and quasi-religious symbolism is more than simply 
circumstantial. Robert Bellah, a monumental figure 
in the sociology of religion, famously declared that in 
America there exists “alongside of and rather clearly 
differentiated from the churches an elaborate and 
well-institutionalized civil religion” (Bellah 1). The 
idea of civil religion is originally Rousseau’s, where 
in The Social Contract he wrote that “the dogmas of 
the civil religion ought to be simple…the existence 
of a powerful, intelligent, beneficent, foresighted, 
and providential divinity; the afterlife; the happiness 
of the just; the punishment of the wicked; the 
sanctity of the social contract and its laws” as well 
as religious tolerance, or rather the exclusion of 
intolerance (Rousseau 102). In this way, “religion can 
also be divided into two types, namely the religion 
of man and that of the citizen” (99). Civil religion is 
not a religion in the sense of Christianity or Islam, 



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but rather, civic life and engagement take on quasi-
religious features. Phillip Hammond suggests we 
revise the term “civil religion” and instead use the 
term “legitimating myth” (Hammond 20), which 
suggests that the concept serves as a way for a nation 
to legitimize itself as a nation to both its citizens and 
to other nations. Rousseau, however, was not writing 
for the new democratic age of which Whitman chants. 
Bellah, in his landmark “Civil Religion in America,” 
notes the uniqueness of the American experience, 
writing that “at its best is a genuine apprehension 
of universal and transcendent religious reality as 
seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through 
the experience of the American people” (12). He 
further writes that “What we have, then, from the 
earliest years of the republic is a collection of beliefs, 
symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things 
and institutionalized in a collectivity” (8). 

To substantiate these claims, he looks to famous 
documents in American history to prove this, noting 
that such things as the Declaration of Independence, 
Washington’s Farewell Address, and numerous 
inaugurals make use of common themes such as 
egalitarianism, supplications to a generalized divine 
power, and the like to legitimize themselves. The 
painting The Apotheosis of Washington (located in 
the Capitol rotunda), for example, depicts the first 
president alongside the goddesses of Victory and 
Law in much the same way Michelangelo painted 
the creation of Adam. The blending of Greek, 
Roman, and Christian imagery communicates his 
importance as father of the nation as well as the 
values that he, and through him the nation, embody. 
Similarly, in the aftermath of two failed attempts 
to march from Selma to Montgomery in protest of 
disenfrachisement, Lyndon B. Johnson convened a 
Joint Session of Congress to declare: 

Rarely are we met with the challenge, not to 
our growth or abundance, or our welfare or 
our society—but rather to the values and the 
purposes and the meaning of our beloved 
nation…and should we double our wealth and 
conquer the stars and still be unequal to this 
issue, then we will have failed as a people and as 
a nation… Above the pyramid on the great seal 
of the United States it says in Latin, “God has 
favored our undertaking.” (Johnson)

President Johnson’s evocation of American destiny 
as inseparable from the need for a just society in the 
sight of God and men was certainly effective. In the 
case of Johnson’s speech, George Pauley notes that 
civil religion allows the President to assume the role 
of national prophet/priest, providing a powerful 
framework for political oratory as interpreting 
national destiny (Pauley 186). Dr. Martin Luther King 
Jr. reportedly told Johnson that the speech was “the 
most moving eloquent unequivocal and passionate 
plea for human rights ever made by any president 
of this nation” (189). American civil religion then 
appears as a common theme or running thread, 
a civil glue that binds the country together into a 
nation united for a common end.

Of important note is that American civil religion 
does not glorify the power of a few naturally born 
aristocrats as the benevolent, providential divinity of 
the State reigning supreme in the Hobbesian sense; 
rather, it is the power of the common man and the 
democratic masses that is exalted above all. In his 
essay “Democratic Vistas,” Whitman writes that 
“I shall use the words America and democracy as 
convertible terms” (Whitman 758). Throughout 
much of his work, Whitman demonstrates the same 
breed of thought emblematic of Bellah’s hypothesized 
civil religion, or legitimating myth, constructing 
America in a quasi-religious light to create a new 
reality that uplifts and sanctifies the entirety of the 
nation. By intertwining the two, Whitman creates 
the same kind of pride that the civil religion instills, 
creating a firm sense of national unity necessary to 
the well-being of a country. Richard Rorty writes 
that Whitman “wanted Americans to take pride 
in what America might, all by itself and by its own 
lights, make of itself ” (Rorty 16). Additionally, 
Kenneth Rexroth writes that he invented the idea 
of “the realization of the American Dream as an 
apocalypse, an eschatological event which would 
give the life of man its ultimate significance (qtd. in 
Rorty 16). Whitman positions America primarily as 
a “teeming Nation of nations” (“By Blue Ontario’s 
Shore” 61) that will lead the charge in the creation 
of a new world, a democratic world made for the 
common man and not the feudal aristocrat. In 
doing so, he wholeheartedly buys into the same 
way of thinking that Bellah says defines American 
public discourse. That is, establishing America as 



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the iconic “city on the hill,” a beacon for the Old 
World to look to, first among nations, tasked with—
as Woodrow Wilson put it—making the world 
“safe for democracy” (Wilson). It is this triumph 
of democracy over the chains of aristocracy that 
legitimates America and gives it purpose as a nation. 
The “intelligent, providential divinity” that Rousseau 
spoke of becomes not a God so stripped of specificity 
as to become unrecognizable but democracy itself, a 
system of governance that elevates man’s capacities 
to new, higher levels. Following this line of thinking, 
those who relentlessly support liberal democratic 
freedoms become the “just,” and any who would 
challenge the Union (such as by seceding) become the 
blasphemous wicked. In Whitman’s line of thinking, 
democratic union is a sacred act that creates a new, 
higher reality for all of mankind and breeds a new 
kind of “democratic individual.”

This process of democracy creating new, better 
citizens of the world takes the figure of speech “body 
politic” to new levels; his poem “By Blue Ontario’s 
Shore” best exemplifies this attitude. In section 
six of that poem, he writes of a single individual, 
a representative American, lifting “to the light a 
west-bred face” (65). The speaker describes how 
various aspects of the country, including cities, 
history, and rivers become “vocal” and “[spend] 
themselves lovingly in him…stretching with them 
North or South” (74-77). This individual is not an 
elite aristocrat but a representative of the democratic 
masses who subsumes all into a national identity. The 
kinship between the individual and the landscape 
makes him into the physical manifestation of the 
will of the country and her people as a function of 
the intermingling pluralism inherent to democracy. 
This process happens within a decidedly religious 
framework. At the start of the poem, a “Phantom 
gigantic superb” appears to the speaker, instructing 
him to “Chant me the poem that comes from the soul 
of America, chant me the carol of victory, / And strike 
up marches of Libertad, marches more powerful yet, 
/ And sing me before you go the song of the throes of 
Democracy” (2-5). Whitman creates his own political 
commissioning that echoes the religious stories of 
God’s appearance to Abram as well as the Virgin 
Mary and the Prophet Muhammed, each foretelling 
new political realities. Whitman places himself 
in line with these figures using the same religious 

imagery of divine commissioning, only his god is 
not divinity but democracy, the “destin’d conqueror” 
(6). Continuing the religious context, the use of a 
single deific personage to represent the entirety of 
the land is suggestive of a more naturalistic religion; 
democracy is a simple consequence of America’s 
character.

In Whitman’s conception, the common citizenry 
is as equally inseparable from the soul of America as 
democracy. This represents a major departure from 
the philosophy of absolutist European monarchies, 
best summed by King Louis XIV’s declaration, “I am 
the State.” In “I Hear America Singing,” the speaker 
writes, “I hear America singing, the varied carols 
I hear, / Those of mechanics, each one singing his 
as it should be blithe and strong,” and continues, 
describing the work of carpenters, masons, sailors, 
farmers, and even the domestic work of the 19th-
century wife and mother (1-8). The speaker 
directly acknowledges that the song of America is 
one of “varied carols,” consisting of the sum of its 
inhabitants. These inhabitants are not aristocrats, 
feudal lords, or the bourgeoisie, but commoners of all 
genders and walks of life. He echoes this sentiment 
again in section twenty-four of “Song of Myself,” 
where Whitman dramatically declares:

Through me the afflatus surging and surging, 
through me the current and index 

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign 
of democracy,

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot 
have their counterpart of on the same terms.

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generation of 

prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of 

thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of 

wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down 

upon (505-513)

By describing the “afflatus” surging through him, 
the speaker positions himself as a conduit from 
which “the sign of democracy” pours out unto the 
world, that sign entwined with the “many long dumb 



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voices” that form the bedrock of the country. Here 
again, Whitman adopts the same prophetic persona 
that he exhibits in the preceding poems, which he 
goes to great lengths to create in “Song of Myself.” 
The society that he envisions is one of profound 
democratic egalitarianism, echoing the same calls 
for equality and freedom common in public political 
discourse. As the prophet of democratic society, it is 
through him that the “many long dumb voices” are 
heard, voices of prisoners, slaves, the impoverished, 
those whose rights are ignored. He envisions a 
world of perfect equality of opportunity, invoking 
the divine to declare that he will accept nothing if 
everyone cannot have the same, a core tenet of liberal 
democratic thought. 

This equality can be seen in the symbol of the 
“leaves of grass” in “Song of Myself.” Here the 
speaker describes it as “a uniform hieroglyphic, / 
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and 
narrow zones, / Growing among black folks as 
among white, / Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, 
Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same” 
(106-109). Understanding the grass as a symbol, 
the speaker notes its democratizing force: it grows 
everywhere equally regardless of race, origin, or 
station. Jane Bennett agrees with this sentiment. 
She uses Whitman’s image of the sun from the 1855 
preface where he writes that the poet “judges not 
as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a 
helpless thing” (620) to describe his politics. With 
this perspective, the poet can “apprehend the outside 
with equanimity” to detect the voices of many 
different sources and incorporate them into the 
democratic self (Bennett 138). The solar perspective 
allows the poet to embrace the commonality of the 
individual as a key part of society, crafting a landscape 
of intermingling threads (133). Through democracy, 
every man is equal just as the sun radiates down 
from above equally, embracing rich and poor, black 
and white, slave and free with identical fervor.  

Through this process of merging and equalizing, 
Whitman attempts to unify the nation into a single 
democratic aggregate of all persons expressed 
equally at the same time. He was quite clear that 
this was the intention, writing that “Leaves of Grass, 
already published, is, in its intentions, the song of 
a great composite Democratic Individual, male or 
female” (172-173).  By doing so, he positions the 

legitimating myth of America as the eventual victory 
of democracy and the creation of a new democratic 
world with America as its beacon. George Kateb says 
that what makes this “transcendence of democratic 
culture” democratic is the “philosophical self-respect” 
it encourages in its citizens. “Democratic culture,” he 
continues, “therefore opens the possibility for each to 
take himself or herself seriously as directly connected 
to whatever is irreducible, to that around which 
the mind can never close” (Kateb 44). Freed from 
shackles of hierarchy to embrace the “irreducible” 
existence of freedom, democratic persons are free to 
engage in building a world charged with democratic 
virtue through everyday action. Through these 
actions and political participation, Americans 
cultivate a kind of “republican virtue,” or “the ability 
of an individual to rise above personal or class 
interest to place the good of the whole community 
above one’s own” (Ball and Dagger 23). This virtue 
is necessary to enable the creation of national unity 
so that the democratic aims of the legitimating myth 
might be accomplished. In American civil religion, 
pursuit of liberty is a transformative act that breeds 
holiness and creates new persons by bestowing them 
with civic virtue; it is this tradition that Whitman 
taps into and promulgates with his poetry. 

However, Whitman’s mystical musings on 
democratic individuals and the relationships between 
them are only one way of understanding the civil 
religion and its innate ties to the events that shaped 
the nation’s history. Bellah outlines two periods 
of American history as “times of trial” undeniably 
crucial to development of American history. Out 
of these periods emerge the “major symbols of the 
American civil religion” (12). What these are should 
be particularly clear: the American Revolution and 
the Civil War, the latter being the most important. 
The conflicts also gave us two of our greatest saints, 
and Bellah, true to the Judeo-Christian framework 
the American mythos writes itself in, figures George 
Washington as a kind of “American Moses” who 
led his people out of the bondage in the British 
Empire. But if Washington is the American Moses, 
then Abraham Lincoln is the American Christ, the 
martyr who sacrificed himself so that the sins of the 
nation might be redeemed. It is significant, then, 
that Whitman lived through the “War Between 
the States,” which, along with the assassination of 



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President Lincoln, had an incredible impact on him. 
Moved by patriotic duty, he volunteered as a nurse, 
where he had a firsthand, immediate view of the 
conflict and its consequences, serving as another 
muse for his poetry. 

One of religion’s primary functions is to help 
understand our relationship with inevitable death. 
In the context of civil religion, this can be seen at 
Arlington National Cemetery, one of the most 
important places in the national capitol and certainly 
one of the most emotionally powerful. The Civil War, 
which Whitman witnessed, provided an unparalleled 
number of deaths for Americans to cope with. Over 
the course of four years, roughly 620,000 were 
killed, more than the American lives lost in both 
World Wars, Vietnam, and Korea combined. That 
total amounts to more than 2% of the population 
at the time (Civil War Trust). In keeping with this, 
American civil religion attempts to find ways of 
understanding why so many died and coping with 
their loss. Julia Ward Howe, in “Battle Hymn of the 
Republic,” expressed this in writing, “as He died 
to make men holy, / let us die to make men free” 
(Howe). Whitman’s poetry is no different; we see the 
same attempts to mourn and legitimize the deaths 
of so many young men. Ed Folsom notes the two-
fold purpose of Whitman’s poetry in its relationship 
with America. Before the war, it serves as a method 
of examining American identity and teaching 
Americans to celebrate diversity and contradictions. 
After, it attempts to catalog the seemingly endlessly 
accumulating deaths (Folsom 73). 

In “Pensive on Her Dead Gazing,” Whitman 
demonstrates one method of legitimizing their 
deaths. Setting the stage, the speaker says that 
“pensive on her dead gazing I heard the Mother of 
All” (1). The speaker positions himself in a religious 
sense, only as a mystic hearing the true nature of 
things instead of as a prophet; in this case, he listens 
to the ceaseless mourning of the “Mother of All.” 
This being charges the earth to “My dead absorb—
my young men’s beautiful bodies absorb—and their 
precious, precious, precious blood; / Which holding 
in trust for me, faithfully back again give me, many 
a year hence” (10-11). This maternal figure, mother 
of the many slain American citizens, mirrors his 
feminine depiction of democracy as “ma femme”; 
democracy is not just a political relationship but a 

loving, maternal one. By eloquently describing the 
trickling of “precious blood” down the mountain 
side and into the trees only to return in the “blowing 
airs from the fields,” Whitman makes room for the 
soldiers and incorporates them into his cycle of 
death and rebirth. This rebirth has new meaning 
in the context of American Christianity; through 
Christ, “all life and death are an endless cycle” in 
a kind of “democratic communion” (Folsom 76). 
Here, the war-dead are metaphorically reborn within 
the context of the civil religion as the very essence 
of the land itself, a land Whitman has already 
demonstrated the need for in his political vision. By 
stressing rebirth, Whitman creates a meaning for 
their dying, transforming their “torn bodies” (2) into 
“immortal heroes” (14) who died so that the nation 
might continue, making their dying a “sweet death” 
(17) and consecrating the very land itself. 

This imagery of America being metaphorically 
baptized in blood can be found in possibly the most 
famous ten sentences in American history: the 
Gettysburg Address. Like Johnson, Lincoln connects 
equality and freedom with national success, 
describing the Civil War as “testing whether that 
nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, 
can long endure” (Lincoln 183). Like Whitman, 
Lincoln turns the conflict from such earthly political 
questions like state’s rights into a sublime contest of 
freedom, transforming nameless infantrymen into 
patriotic martyrs. Like the trickling blood which 
purifies the land, Lincoln evocatively declares that 
“we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we 
can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living 
and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, 
far above our poor power to add or detract” (183). 
Like a priest, he finishes by issuing a commissioning 
to the living present, saying that “we here highly 
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth 
of freedom—and that government of the people, 
by the people, for the people, shall not perish from 
the earth” (183). This speech spoke to the core of 
American legitimating myth; it is part of the reason 
that Bellah would refer to Lincoln as the “American 
Christ.”

To be Christ-like entails death for a higher 
purpose; in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, 
Whitman would again try to make sense of his death 



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in the context of religious dedication. Parkinson 
writes that, in this context, “the figure of Lincoln 
has symbolic stature that extends beyond the merely 
personal, and it is so that Whitman sees his death, 
not that of one alone but that of the sacrificial 
participants of the civil war” (Parkinson 1). The 
process of mourning is best seen in Whitman’s great 
elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” 
Like “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” the religious allusions 
of the poem are obvious from the very beginning 
of the poem, with the image of “the great star early 
droop’d in the western sky in the night” (Whitman 2) 
recalling the Star of Bethlehem. Narrating Lincoln’s 
funeral procession, Whitman places a special 
emphasis on the surrounding landscape that evokes 
“the thought of him I love,” describing the land as 
both “body and soul” (89). Throughout the poem, 
the relationship between the landscape and the 
essence of the nation again becomes intertwined, 
the body and soul respectively, as the passing of 
America’s greatest martyr causes Whitman to look 
to the land and the people to understand and cope 
with death. The speaker calls the death that looms 
over the land “sane and sacred” (48), as Lincoln’s 
purported sacrifice has immortalized him as the 
soldier’s heroism sanctified Gettysburg. As the 
poem continues, the image of “him I love” becomes 
increasingly mixed with Whitman’s memories of 
all the dead of the war, writing that he “saw battle-
corpses, myriads of them, / And the white skeletons 
of young men, I saw them, / I saw the debris and 
debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,  / … / 
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not” 
(177-180). The thought of Lincoln merges into the 
whole of the dead, becoming one with the composite 
democratic individual, their deaths sanctifying 
the soil of these states and whose blood bound the 
Union together (Parkinson 12). Lincoln appears as 
the last and greatest of these martyrs. This process 
allows Whitman’s mourning to be at last complete. 
He finishes: 

Passing the visions, passing the night, 
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ 

hands, 
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the 

tallying song of my soul, 
Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying 

ever-altering song, …

Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped 
leaves, 

I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, 
returning with spring. 

I cease from my song for thee (Whitman 185-
189, 193-195)

The repeated “passing” suggests that the pain of death 
has passed on, beyond “the visions” and “the night,” 
leaving the dead in the dooryard to continuously be 
reborn in spring, at rest in the cycle of life and death. 
This cycle is firmly rooted in civil religion, providing a 
meaning for both the dead and those who still linger. 
Lincoln’s death, and the deaths of all the soldiers, are 
here understood in the context of what they have 
done for the country, ensuring that “government of 
the people, by the people, for the people, shall not 
perish from the earth” (Lincoln 183). 

While the relevance of both Lincoln and 
Whitman’s political vision should, in today’s political 
climate, become quite clear, its use is much more 
complicated. Whitman’s central position in the 
American canon makes this vision particularly 
important in the shifting political landscape, as the 
winds of nationalism and populism rise at home 
and abroad. However, as other thinkers have noted, 
the literary form Whitman uses to communicate 
his message does not easily enable a transition into 
making discrete, specific policy proposals. Nor do the 
reputation of figures like Washington or Lincoln that 
civil religion creates live up to historical scrutiny. At 
the same time that George Washington took his place 
amongst the gods, he owned a sizable population of 
slaves; Lincoln, too, was a ruthless pragmatist who 
wrote that “if I could save the Union without freeing 
any slave I would do it” (Lincoln 44). The same goes 
for Whitman; Terrel Carver writes that we should 
steer well away from turning him into an icon, rightly 
noting that the poet’s views on race, gender equality, 
and imperialism would all be considered offensive in 
a modern climate (Carver 223). He makes the same 
argument against “iconizing” democracy as well, 
noting its history of both promoting egalitarianism 
but also defending “traditional” institutions of 
monarchy, elitism, and discrimination (223-224). 
American history bears this out, with its genocide 
against Native Americans, Reagan-era toppling 



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of democratically-elected governments in Latin 
America, and a long history of both de jure and de 
facto discrimination against minorities that led to 
the civil rights movement. By framing a portrayal 
of Whitman in an iconized portrayal of democracy 
and America, there is little, Carver says, Whitman 
can tell us that we don’t already know (225). Though 
Whitman’s ideals are certainly religious in nature, it 
would be inaccurate to associate them exclusively 
with a particular religious tradition, especially in 
a country as steeped in Christianity as the United 
States. The ideals show a particular emphasis on 
moving beyond particular institutions in pursuit of a 
great democratic good in the immediate world rather 
than the next. While the danger of confirmation bias 
and of stripping Whitman’s actual ideas down to 
meaningless rhetoric is indeed great, the romantic 
conception of American identity and potential as a 
force for good provides a welcome breath of fresh 
air in the modern political climate. Thus, Whitman-
esque optimism can be an inspirational force that 
can encourage us to become engaged in the world in 
order to implement those democratic values. 

William James and other pragmatists like 
Richard Rorty see room for Whitman, however. 
James thought that Whitman allows us to “forget 
the low in yourself, then, think only of the high 
...[T]hrough angers, losses, ignorance, ennui” 
(qtd. in Malachuk 63). Instead of dwelling in the 
romantic world of ideals and absolute truths, James 
considers the poem as putting forth a method to 
improve the self. Daniel Malachuk notes that he, 
like Carver, argues against worshipping Whitman as 
an incredible icon (Malachuk 65). Optimism is key. 
He wrote that “with many men the question of life’s 
worth is answered by a temperamental optimism 
which makes them incapable of believing that 
anything seriously evil can exist…Whitman’s works 
are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism” 
(qtd. in Malachuk 64). The significant impact, then, 
is not whether Whitman accurately depicts reality, 
but what that depiction can do for us as a nation and 
people still striving to accomplish our aims. Both the 
civil religion and Whitman, despite their errancy, 
serve a role in helping us do this. Rorty writes that 
“just as too little self-respect makes it difficult to 
display moral courage, so insufficient national pride 
makes energetic and effective debate about national 

policy unlikely” (Rorty 3). The optimism inherent 
in Whitman encourages political participation that 
allows us to accomplish the aims of the legitimating 
myth. At the same time, it allows us to cope with the 
loss of our dead, both historical and contemporary. 
This type of civic pride that Whitman so relentlessly 
promotes serves this role in political society. By 
providing a set of stories to tell ourselves, it gives us a 
sense of our place within the world, creating national 
unity and encouraging positive public participation. 
But, these stories and figures are a double-edged 
sword, and must be accompanied by a genuinely 
mature understanding of how these values of 
democracy and equality play out in a confusing and 
frequently contradictory world. Yet, in recognizing 
these contradictions and the work we have yet to do, 
perhaps we can glimpse what Whitman glimpsed so 
many years ago by blue Ontario’s shore. 

Works Cited
Ball, Terrence, and Richard Dagger. Political 

Ideologies and the Democratic Ideal. 9th ed., 
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Aisthesis      Volume 9,  2018

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