17 pages • 34 minutes read
Walt WhitmanAmerica
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1888A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman (1860)
An early and enthusiastic expression of Whitman’s fierce advocacy of the American experience, this poem can be compared to “America,” an expression more tempered by the experience of the Civil War. The enthusiasm may be moderated but the same sort of celebration of the one-forged-by-the-many defines Whitman’s lifelong perception of the value of the American experiment.
“National Ode” by Bayard Taylor (1876)
The defining expression of the nation’s Bicentennial, in fact read during the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the poem, elegant and carefully developed, is exactly what Whitman rejected: a celebration of America through the formal strictures of rhythm and rhyme inherited from the very country from which America had declared its independence.
“America” by Allen Ginsberg (1956)
To understand Whitman’s position as American’s Poet of Democracy, a comparison to one of Whitman’s most enthusiastic Postmodern admirers can help illuminate (or perhaps deflate) Whitman’s resolute optimism. Ginsberg takes the same position of the poet as a public functionary and uses the free verse form as satire to excoriate America for its failure to live up to the ideals of its own inception, its lapse into moral complacency, and its appetite for material reward.
Further Literary Resources
“Shall Walt Whitman Be #Cancelled?” by Lavelle Porter (2022)
As a caustic contemporary critique of Whitman’s long-accepted position as the defining American poet of the 19th century, this essay explores whether Whitman’s sense of America and Whitman himself are still relevant. Whitman’s idealism and his eagerness to be the national poet caused him to overlook the realities of racism and to the plight of both immigrants and women within the white patriarchal system that defined Gilded Age America.
“Song of Ourselves: The Principles of American Democracy and Walt Whitman” by Garrett Moore (2015)
As a thorough investigation into Whitman’s career-long fascination with the concepts of democracy as a political and social model, the essay argues that Whitman’s Transcendentalist leanings, his belief that the material universe was a manifestation of a cosmos-wide spirituality, offered him the chance to see democracy not as a political template but rather as a religious model that infused the American experimental with its spiritual dimension regardless of the realities of day-to-day experience.
“Whitman and the Culture of Democracy” by George Kateb (1990)
Although Whitman’s oeuvre has been the subject of contemporary scrutiny that often finds the poet out of sync with contemporary American culture, this landmark essay represents the majority view for more than a century after Whitman’s death. Using both Whitman’s poetry and his essays on democracy, the essay finds in Whitman the national advocate for the virtue of democratic ideals as a template for the artist to be free to create original work. Democracy alone produced the radical free-verse energy of Whitman’s American poetry.
Listen to Poem
Just two years before his death, Whitman recorded the first several lines of “America.” It is believed to be the only recording of Whitman. Through the hisses and pops of a wax cylinder recording, the voice is compelling because it is Whitman himself. Too old to indulge the theatrics that his free verse invites, the recording, available on The Walt Whitman Archive website, offers nevertheless the powerful first-hand experience of the poem through the voice of the poet himself. Particularly stirring is Whitman’s cadenced recitation of the adjectives, each word, despite Whitman’s advanced years, given its expression, its own integrity.
Related Titles
By Walt Whitman
