tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/walt-whitman-18405/articlesWalt Whitman – The Conversation2020-05-14T12:47:03Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1384492020-05-14T12:47:03Z2020-05-14T12:47:03ZFive books from the 19th century that will help you understand modern America better<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/334660/original/file-20200513-156637-qpwvsv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=192%2C0%2C1285%2C790&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Harriet Jacobs, writer of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Jacobs#/media/File:Harriet_Ann_Jacobs1894.png">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>There’s a reason why one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/ralph-ellisons-invisible-man-as-a-parable-of-our-time">Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man</a> (1952), begins with an <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3199183?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">epigraph by the writer Herman Melville</a> and an allusion to the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7256636-i-am-an-invisible-man-no-i-am-not-a">ghosts who haunted Edgar Allan Poe</a>. </p>
<p>If you want to understand anything about the US in the 20th and 21st centuries, you need to know 19th-century American literature. The 19th century was when many, if not most, of the problems and ideologies that define American culture were codified, and literature of the period shows creative responses to this change. </p>
<p>For the first half of the 19th century, a lot of ink was spilt worrying whether the US would ever have a literature of its own. Many famous writers, including <a href="http://digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a> and <a href="https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1855/whole.html">Walt Whitman</a>, urged Americans to leave English literature behind and take up specifically American themes, peoples and spaces.</p>
<p>At the same time, indigenous and enslaved Americans such as Harriet Jacobs, William Apess and Frederick Douglass used their pens and their rhetorical might to urge the US government to end race and ethnicity-based persecution and genocide. </p>
<p>After the American Civil War (1861-1865), writers rarely worried about whether the country had a literature and whether it was any good (it quite obviously was). They had innovated new genres (think of Emily Dickinson’s spare and searing verses) and turned their attention to issues of inequality embedded in American culture, as in Kate Chopin’s proto-feminist novella The Awakening and Charles Chesnutt’s exposure of racism and white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South.</p>
<p>The following five works embody both the beauty of 19th-century American literature as well as its ability to change hearts and minds.</p>
<h2>1. <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/293309/incidents-in-the-life-of-a-slave-girl-by-harriet-jacobs/">Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</a> by Harriet Jacobs (1861)</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/16/incidents-life-slave-girl-harriet-jacobs-true-account-reads-as-novel">Jacobs’ slave autobiography</a> may not be the earliest written or the most famous, but it’s a devastatingly effective piece of storytelling that reads like a novel. Jacobs’ story of surviving slavery is so remarkable a narrative that sheds a rare light on the female experience of slavery. </p>
<p>Written under a pseudonym (Linda Brent), for a long time scholars assumed it must be fiction written by a white abolitionist. It wasn’t until African-American and feminist scholars <a href="http://nbhistoricalsociety.org/Important-Figures/harriet-jacobs-writer/">unearthed the true identity</a> in 1987 of Harriet Jacobs that the truth of her life story was accepted. Her narrative has since become a classic text of resistance, and it’s an essential read for understanding how white supremacy continues to function in America today. </p>
<h2>2. <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305252/leaves-of-grass/9780241303122.html">Leaves of Grass</a> by Walt Whitman (1855; last new edition 1881)</h2>
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<span class="caption">Engraving of Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaves_of_Grass#/media/File:Walt_Whitman,_steel_engraving,_July_1854.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<p>Walt Whitman was a virtually unknown journalist and printer when the first edition of <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-walt-whitmans-leaves-of-grass-and-the-complex-life-of-the-poet-of-america-116055">Leaves of Grass</a> thundered upon the American literary world. The strange book listed no author and contained a casual engraving of Whitman with hand on hip and head cocked to the side. Most importantly, it included poems like the world had never seen before. Poems with long cascading lines and little rhyme or metre to be found. Whitman continually added to and edited Leaves of Grass over the course of his life, crafting his biography in poetry that we now recognise as revolutionary in both form and content. It made Whitman a touchstone for 20th-century poets like Allen Ginsberg and Adrienne Rich.</p>
<h2>3. <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645811/little-women-by-louisa-may-alcott/">Little Women</a> by Louisa May Alcott (1868-69)</h2>
<p>If you’ve seen the most recent movie adaptation of <a href="https://theconversation.com/little-women-greta-gerwigs-direction-creates-big-emotions-and-deserved-an-oscar-129998">Little Women</a> (or any of the many previous adaptations), you’ll know that there’s something about Alcott’s novel (originally two novels, now published as one) that strikes a chord. Written in the shadow of the Civil War, Little Women draws upon Alcott’s own remarkable family life among famous Transcendentalist writers and thinkers in Concord, Massachusetts. It’s a skillfully crafted book about how the dreams of childhood do and, more often, do not come to fruition.</p>
<h2>4. <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-conjure-woman-and-other-conjure-tales">The Conjure Woman</a> by Charles Chesnutt (1899)</h2>
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<span class="caption">First edition book cover of The Conjure Woman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conjure_Woman#/media/File:Conjure_Woman_book_cover.JPG">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<p>In the late 19th centuries, a genre called “<a href="https://public.wsu.edu/%7Ecampbelld/amlit/lcolor.html">local color</a>” dominated American literary magazines. These stories introduced areas of the increasingly expanding United States to those living in urban centres. African-American writer Charles Chesnutt turned this genre on its head in his series of “conjure” stories – tales of magic and cunning told by a formerly enslaved man named Julius to entertain a white northern businessman. Julius’ stories weave together African-American folklore and Southern Gothic ambience to expose white supremacy in the south before the Civil War. These stories indirectly comment on the racism that continued to haunt the post-Civil War US under a different guise.</p>
<h2>5. <a href="https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/benito-cereno/">Benito Cereno</a> by Herman Melville (1855)</h2>
<p>While these days Melville’s gargantuan 1851 novel Moby-Dick may be more famous (and
you should definitely read that too, when you have a few months to spare), nothing packs a punch quite like the novella Benito Cereno. Based on the story of a real slave revolt on board a ship, the text is paced like a horror story and full of ambivalences and doubled meanings. It reveals the true horror of race-based chattel slavery and anticipates the eruption of violence that would tear apart the United States within a few short years.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138449/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jillian Spivey Caddell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The problems and ideologies that define American culture were formed in the 19th century.Jillian Spivey Caddell, Lecturer in nineteenth-century American literature, University of KentLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1300432020-02-03T13:53:26Z2020-02-03T13:53:26ZDo authors really put deeper meaning into poems and stories – or do readers make it up?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312578/original/file-20200129-92954-lqsff9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Many books, like 'Charlotte's Web,' contain symbolism.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/near-rural-window-daylight-dark-room-1486987019">Dmitriy Os Ivanov/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-left ">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/curious-kids-us-74795">Curious Kids</a> is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Do authors really put deeper meaning into poems and stories – or do readers make it up? Jordan, 14, Indianapolis, Indiana</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>One of my favorite novels is <a href="https://www.npr.org/2011/07/05/137452030/how-e-b-white-spun-charlottes-web">“Charlotte’s Web</a>,” the famous story of a friendship between a pig and a spider.</p>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=b2aAT9YAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">I often talk</a> about this novel with my students studying children’s literature. At some point, someone always asks about “deeper meaning.” Is it really a story of, say, the cycle of death and rebirth? Or the importance of friendship? Or the significance of writing?</p>
<p>Or is it just a story of life in the barn, with talking animals? </p>
<p>In a way, it doesn’t matter. Because every writer is also a reader, and that means that whatever a writer puts into a story probably came from somewhere else, whether it’s another story, or a poem, or their own life experience.</p>
<p>And readers, too, will bring their own experience – of other stories, other poems and life – and that will direct their interpretation of what they absorb. We can see one example of this if we look at the spider in “Charlotte’s Web.”</p>
<h2>The meaning of character</h2>
<p>That spider, Charlotte, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/07/biographer-spider-charlottes-web">is based on a real spider</a>. We know this because E.B. White drew pictures of spiders, studied them and made sure to be as accurate as he could when he wrote about them.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312575/original/file-20200129-92949-1nbo2r7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312575/original/file-20200129-92949-1nbo2r7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312575/original/file-20200129-92949-1nbo2r7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312575/original/file-20200129-92949-1nbo2r7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312575/original/file-20200129-92949-1nbo2r7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312575/original/file-20200129-92949-1nbo2r7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1084&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312575/original/file-20200129-92949-1nbo2r7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1084&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/312575/original/file-20200129-92949-1nbo2r7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1084&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">‘Charlotte’s Web’ by E. B. White.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte%27s_Web#/media/File:CharlotteWeb.png">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>But, to a reader she <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arachne">may also represent Arachne</a>, the talented weaver who challenged the goddess Athena and was changed into a spider for her pride. Or she may be the “noiseless patient spider” of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45473/a-noiseless-patient-spider">Walt Whitman’s poem</a>, who flings out thread-like filaments as the poet flings out words.</p>
<p>She may also be the spider who weaves “<a href="https://www.vqronline.org/silken-tent">the silken tent</a>” of Robert Frost’s poem. Maybe we’ll think about how the spider, like a human storyteller, generates something seemingly out of nothing, which makes her web miraculous.</p>
<p>Each of these spiders symbolizes different things. When we read about her, then, we may think of all those other spiders. Or we may just think about the spider we saw on our own front porch that morning, weaving her own web.</p>
<p>As the writer Philip Pullman said, “The meaning of a story emerges in the meeting between the words on the page and the <a href="https://www.philip-pullman.com/">thoughts in the reader’s mind</a>.”</p>
<h2>The reader is in charge</h2>
<p>What Pullman is suggesting, then, is that it’s up to readers to make the meaning they want out of the stories they hear and the books they read.</p>
<p>It’s a powerful statement: We are in charge.</p>
<p>This doesn’t mean that anything goes. Meanings come from context, from convention, from older stories and from previous usage. But it’s up to us to interpret what we read and to make the case for how we’re doing it.</p>
<p>Or, as the novelist John Green writes of his books, “<a href="https://www.johngreenbooks.com/where-i-get-my-ideas-inspiration-and-general-writing-stuff">They belong to their readers now</a>, which is a great thing – because the books are more powerful in the hands of my readers than they could ever be in my hands.”</p>
<p>What we do with the books we read matters, Green tells us. It’s up to us to make the meaning and up to us to decide what to do with that meaning once we’ve made it.</p>
<p><em>Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to <a href="mailto:curiouskidsus@theconversation.com">CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com</a>. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.</em></p>
<p><em>And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/130043/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elisabeth Gruner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Authors sometimes put deeper meanings into their stories, but really, it’s the reader who decides.Elisabeth Gruner, Associate Professor of English, University of RichmondLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1192552019-06-21T15:23:52Z2019-06-21T15:23:52Z‘Button Poetry’, a new awakening on American stages and screens<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/280701/original/file-20190621-61747-w3k7ow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=120%2C2%2C1317%2C806&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sarah Kay, "The Type".</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Button Poetry</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>If you grow up the type of woman men want to look at,<br>
You can let them look at you.<br>
But do not mistake eyes for hands or windows or mirrors.<br>
Let them see what a woman looks like.<br>
They may not have ever seen one before.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So begins Sarah Kay’s poem “The Type”, viewed more than <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5DH3eN81b0RGJ7Xj3fsjVg">2 million times</a> on the YouTube channel of <a href="https://buttonpoetry.com/">Button Poetry</a>. Hanif Abdurraqib, another of its valuable contributors, also has more than 63,000 followers on <a href="https://twitter.com/NifMuhammad">Twitter</a>. How does one explain the success of this new American poetic movement?</p>
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<span class="caption">Hanif Abdurraqib, ‘When I Say That Loving Me Is Kind of Like Being a Chicago Bulls Fan’.</span>
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<h2>The ins and outs of Button Poetry</h2>
<p>The declared purpose of Button Poetry is closer to a creative and political renewal of poetic performances than to a basic – not to say hackneyed – overhauling of the poetic medium.</p>
<p>The performances of Button Poetry are far removed from the poet who sits alone with his blank page, or who simply reads his verses to the audience. Instead, they endorse poems that “live in books and bars, magazines and theaters, the mind and the mouth”. Set off by the “cross-pollination between the page and the stage,” their work gives off sparks while lowering “the boundaries between performance and print”, reminding us of the aesthetic stance of <a href="https://theconversation.com/an-intimate-arresting-exhibition-highlights-the-hard-work-of-living-queer-118176">queerdom</a>, which posits the importance of considering archives, poetry and performance all in one go.</p>
<p>Sam Cook and Sierra DeMulder founded Button Poetry in 2011, and in April 2012 they recorded their first on-camera contest. The College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational took on a slam-like style in the wake of the spoken word of the Beat generation. With Allen Ginsberg in mind, Button Poetry certainly fuels the claim that poetry is “an outlet” that enables us to publicly talk about what is known in private, our intimate experiences. Button poems make the most of that dichotomy, helping foster the passage from private suffering to widely aired poetic performance, without losing sight of their literary influences: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qviM_GnJbOM">Maya Angelou</a>’s activism; the confessional poetry of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM">Sylvia Plath</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKvxbHptWEQ">Robert Lowell</a>; the spiritual outcry prompted by gospel songs; the political lyricism of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_6Z1_3btQ8">Langston Hughes</a>; and perhaps <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtt%20--%200hkY">Walt Whitman</a>’s most irreverent lines when he wonders “Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious?” (<em>Leaves of Grass</em>, first edition 1855).</p>
<p>Although references and implicit tributes do pack a punch, one would silence the voices of Button poems by overloading them with a restrictive literary legacy and classifying them as mere rejuvenating forays into American poetry. Button poems stand out on their own merit, and shine when viewed in isolation.</p>
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<h2>The haberdasher of souls</h2>
<p>Button Poetry extended its reach through many outlets, including <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ButtonPoetry/">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/buttonpoetry?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/buttonpoetry/?hl=en">Instagram</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5DH3eN81b0RGJ7Xj3fsjVg">YouTube</a> and <a href="https://buttonpoetry.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>. Such accessibility makes Button poems likely to pop up on our screens at any moment of the day and fill our minds on public transport or when lost among skyscrapers. Scrolling their YouTube channel or Instagram account, updated with new verses several times a week, feels like opening the door of an unusual haberdashery where you can find anything you need – buttons, needles, thread – to mend your torn rags. It is in such a shop that you will find Button poems crystallized on shelves as outlets for trauma and ecstasy, for injured souls and the intricacies of desire, at everyone’s disposal.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/BhE-fadnN9r/ ?hl=en\u0026taken-by=buttonpoetry","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>But Button Poetry offers no panacea, instead it shows the immense diversity of the textile and textual craft of those trying to solve the – seemingly unsolvable – dilemmas they face. Button poems avoid the pitfalls of a poetry undermined by mawkishness and accomplish the remarkable feat of instantly coalescing diverse experiences into a single energy, and for a mass audience. They range from the worst aspects of human interaction (racism in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnooJTNhaPQ">“The Shotgun”</a>; rape in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW5b3RG7mfk&t=92s">“The ‘I’m Sorry’ Poem”</a>; body-shaming in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFQ7zqn6j18&t=83s">“The Fat Joke”</a>) to the daily wonders of one’s existence that are too exquisite not to strive for (the whims of childhood in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_BrSSsiMMo&t=15s">“Baby Brother”</a>; the simple beauty of love in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue7LgNqDO3A">“Pretzeled Bodies”</a>). Button poems offer a version of daily life that is so drawn to the metaphorical that it often comes as a small aesthetic shock:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The following morning you came to me<br>
A smile in one hand and God in the other<br>
And I have never stopped confusing the two.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Button Poetry does not isolate these themes, and within a single poem a complex interweaving of emotions mirrors the complexity of human experience. The poetic format is demanding though, giving performers as little as two to five minutes to interpret a poem whose dense metaphors risk hindering the fluidity and clarity of speech. The visual and audio experience is intense, and one cannot be anything but overawed by the mastery behind these seamless performances, where anger is measured and holding back tears is a struggle.</p>
<h2>“Show them your fangs, your claws, your anger”</h2>
<p>In a bid to seize the moral high ground vacated by political figures, Button Poetry explores the gap between the stifling conformity of American society and an infinite number of anonymous individuals. Button poems disrupt the logical order of stale everyday language, unapologetically rejecting any coercive attempt by politicians and technocrats to manipulate reality to ward off the misery of everyday life. In providing a voice for the downtrodden, the performers help them take back control of their lives, as an attempt to make <a href="https://theconversation.com/making-poetry-their-own-the-evolution-of-poetry-education-74671">“poetry their own”</a>.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216165/original/file-20180424-57591-pdfrn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216165/original/file-20180424-57591-pdfrn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216165/original/file-20180424-57591-pdfrn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216165/original/file-20180424-57591-pdfrn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216165/original/file-20180424-57591-pdfrn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216165/original/file-20180424-57591-pdfrn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216165/original/file-20180424-57591-pdfrn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216165/original/file-20180424-57591-pdfrn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Britteney Conner.</span>
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<p>Button poets fight to recapture reality itself, through shouting and finger-pointing and gossamer-light texts that turn out to be strongholds against blinkered forces threatening the expression of individual suffering. Needless to say, Button Poetry implicitly indicts the plutocrats who think that facts can be alternative and truth relative, all the more so since the last presidential election.</p>
<p>Many of these poems are memories and revive personal anecdotes that unfold with discretion or eloquence, in different tones: irony, tenderness, bitterness, glee, despair, ecstasy, rage, amusement, etc. For the few minutes that are granted them, Button poems appear as open wounds on the intimacy of our world, from which shouted and whispered memories spring out and share the origin of their pain or the reason for their state of grace. But even though the poems host a multitude of feelings, they never venture on to the path of contrived and inauthentic universality. Rather, they assert that our sufferings are not equal even if they do strike us in a same space and at the same time.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216167/original/file-20180424-57598-1ferob6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216167/original/file-20180424-57598-1ferob6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216167/original/file-20180424-57598-1ferob6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216167/original/file-20180424-57598-1ferob6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216167/original/file-20180424-57598-1ferob6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216167/original/file-20180424-57598-1ferob6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216167/original/file-20180424-57598-1ferob6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216167/original/file-20180424-57598-1ferob6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>As the audience ignores the pain on stage, the performances unsparingly display their mercurial strength and leave us in no doubt of what to think. The simple staged features of Button shows make for breathtaking moments of revolt that unsettle the audience and force them out of their comfort zone. It is not enough to simply sing anthems like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTyKJjj2oC0">“We Shall Overcome”</a>, by Mahalia Jackson or Joan Baez. We can’t just take refuge in the safety of daily life while Javon Johnson fires off a volley of bullet-like words in “The Shotgun”. An exercise in futility, Button Poetry certainly is not.</p>
<p>At the heart of capitalism and ultra-liberalism, where everything has a price tag, including human feelings, Button Poetry invites us to question the – often times selective – empathy that we feel, to show more of it and act accordingly. As they drop beauty in the palm of our hands, these dazzling poems unequivocally state that, when it comes to the inner bruises of humanity, lucidity has no price.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119255/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julien Brugeron ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>Since 2011, Button Poetry has offered a large number of powerful poetic performances that reveal the plurality of individual stories in the United States.Julien Brugeron, Doctorant en littérature américaine / PhD candidate in American literature, Université Paris Nanterre – Université Paris LumièresLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1160552019-05-31T03:33:10Z2019-05-31T03:33:10ZGuide to the classics: Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the complex life of the ‘poet of America’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276247/original/file-20190523-187182-1cg2q4t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Poet Walt Whitman in his home in New Jersey in 1891. Born 200 years ago this week, Whitman is celebrated in America for his daring poetry collection Leaves of Grass.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WaltWhitman-Camden1891.jpg">Samuel Murray/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is a longer read. Enjoy!</em></p>
<p>This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Walt Whitman, America’s most admired poet. Celebrations will be <a href="http://waltwhitmaninitiative.org/international-whitman-week-2019/">especially joyful</a> around his birthday on May 31 and in New York City, whose citizens were often depicted in his poems. But the poetry many people now love won him notoriety before it won him fame.</p>
<p><a href="https://whitmanarchive.org/biography/walt_whitman/index.html#origins">Whitman’s life</a> was interesting and varied. He was born in 1819 and grew up in and around Brooklyn, moving often as his family tried to make money from farming and real estate. His formal education ended when he was 11. He worked by turns in Manhattan and Brooklyn as a printer’s apprentice, a schoolteacher and a newspaper publisher, before resolving to become a writer. </p>
<p>Having had some success – <a href="https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_81.html">a novel</a> and newspaper pieces – he became chief editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, but lost this position when his opposition to the spread of slavery clashed with the views of the newspaper’s owner. Luckily, an opportunity arose to work on a newspaper in New Orleans. Whitman enjoyed this different culture, but never lost his horror of slave auctions. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276249/original/file-20190523-187185-rsfwc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276249/original/file-20190523-187185-rsfwc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276249/original/file-20190523-187185-rsfwc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276249/original/file-20190523-187185-rsfwc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276249/original/file-20190523-187185-rsfwc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276249/original/file-20190523-187185-rsfwc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276249/original/file-20190523-187185-rsfwc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276249/original/file-20190523-187185-rsfwc8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Walt Whitman, oil on canvas, 1887.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C2%A7Whitman,_Walt_(1819-1892)_-_1887_-_ritr._da_Eakins,_Thomas_-_da_Internet.jpg">Thomas Eakins/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>On learning his brother George might have been injured during the Civil War, Whitman travelled to Washington DC and Fredericksburg, Virginia, to look for him. Fortunately, George’s wound was only superficial, but Whitman stayed on in Washington as a nurse, where he attended to sick, maimed and dying soldiers. </p>
<p>Working in field hospitals, Whitman’s health deteriorated, and at the age of 53 he suffered a stroke. Although he made a partial recovery, he was cared for by friends until he died almost 20 years later in March 1892. By then, he was admired for his writing in England, but the thousands who lined the streets in New Jersey for his funeral procession were probably more curious about his enormous tomb, which he had designed himself, than his writing.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277120/original/file-20190530-171492-a5alrx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277120/original/file-20190530-171492-a5alrx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/277120/original/file-20190530-171492-a5alrx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277120/original/file-20190530-171492-a5alrx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277120/original/file-20190530-171492-a5alrx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277120/original/file-20190530-171492-a5alrx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277120/original/file-20190530-171492-a5alrx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/277120/original/file-20190530-171492-a5alrx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Walt Whitman’s tomb in Camden, New Jersey.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/barteverts/2411565944/in/photolist-cb92L-cb92M-8odiSz-4F6Uxb-6Lg7S6">Bart E/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<h2>Whitman’s innovation</h2>
<p>We don’t know how or why Whitman began to invent his extraordinary poetry. In 1842 he listened to “The Poet”, a lecture in which philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called for <a href="https://user.xmission.com/%7Eseldom74/emerson/the_poet.html">a national bard</a> who could write about the US in all its diversity. But Whitman’s daring originality seems more than a mere response to Emerson’s demands.</p>
<p>It is clear he thought of his book of poems,<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114336-leaves-of-grass-and-selected-poems-and-prose?from_search=true"> Leaves of Grass</a>, as an experimental project. He took the opportunity of having the best compositors, <a href="https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_47.html">the Rome brothers</a>, typeset his poems, and he supervised the work closely, revising his poetry to fit the page. He even set about ten pages of the type himself.</p>
<p>The book’s long non-rhyming lines are reminiscent of bible verses. Each seems to correspond with a single breath or a single gesture. Words or phrases are often repeated at the beginning of a series of lines, building up a rhythmical pattern. However, Whitman is careful to break the pattern before it can become mere rhetoric. The reader is constantly being called to attention:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!</p>
<p>Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!</p>
<p>Earth of departed sunset - earth of the mountains misty-topt!</p>
<p>Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!</p>
<p>Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!</p>
<p>Earth of the limpid grey of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!</p>
<p>Far-swooping elbow’d earth - rich apple-blossom’d earth!</p>
<p>Smile, for your lover comes. (“Song of Myself”, canto 21)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Leaves of Grass was Whitman’s sole book of poetry. Rather than publish several collections containing new poems, he revised and expanded this single volume, so that the first edition of 12 poems eventually became a thick book of close to 400 poems.</p>
<p>There are six editions of the book (nine, if you count different type-settings). As soon as one was published Whitman would revise, regroup and add to the poems, treating the published book as a manuscript to be edited and republished. </p>
<p>The overall result of this practice is that Whitman’s poetry is seen always to flow from a single being; it is as unified and as singular as the man who made it.</p>
<p>The first edition of Leaves of Grass did not even contain the author’s name on the title page, but he was instantly recognisable from his picture on the frontispiece – a working man in his prime, open-shirted, hat on the back of his head, hand on hip, looking straight out at the reader. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Walt Whitman, 1854, frontispiece to Leaves of grass, Fulton St., Brooklyn, N.Y., 1855, steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Walt_Whitman,_steel_engraving,_July_1854.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<h2>The poet of democracy</h2>
<p>Emerson’s influence – or Whitman’s agreement with Emerson – can be seen in Whitman’s insistence on democracy as a central value of American society. People are equal, according to Whitman, because we are all mortal; moreover, we all have immortal souls. </p>
<p>In “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version">Song of Myself</a>”, we can see the connection between democracy, equality and immortality in the symbolic use of grass, which grows everywhere:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] I guess it is 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. […] </p>
<p>Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps. […]</p>
<p>What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?</p>
<p>They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death […]</p>
<p>All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In this passage the grass signifies equality, by making no distinction where it grows. A “hieroglyphic” symbol might need an expert – such as Whitman – to translate it, but it grows “uniform[ly]”, giving everyone the same rights and the same chances to mean something in the great poem that is America, as Whitman saw it.</p>
<h2>Poet of the soul</h2>
<p>As a result of Whitman’s habit of revision, we can witness the growth of many poems. <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/sleepers">The Sleepers</a>, generally agreed to be among his finest, was worked on over the course of his career. </p>
<p>It is one of his most ambitious poems, with a triumphant ending that seems genuinely earned. It poses questions about the limitations of a single human life. How can one life, or one death, or one gender, be enough for a man, a poet, consumed by curiosity? </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276246/original/file-20190523-187153-63jig9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276246/original/file-20190523-187153-63jig9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276246/original/file-20190523-187153-63jig9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276246/original/file-20190523-187153-63jig9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276246/original/file-20190523-187153-63jig9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276246/original/file-20190523-187153-63jig9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276246/original/file-20190523-187153-63jig9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276246/original/file-20190523-187153-63jig9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114336-leaves-of-grass-and-selected-poems-and-prose?from_search=true">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Whitman wants to dream every sleeper’s dream, be every sleeper’s lover, know every person’s meaning in the larger scheme, live everyone’s life and die everyone’s death.</p>
<p>In the third section of the poem, he envisages a beautiful swimmer, who comes to grief on rocks and dies. His body is then retrieved and laid out in a barn, with others, to be mourned just as the slain soldiers in the Revolutionary War (1775-83) were mourned by General Washington.</p>
<p>A Native American woman comes to visit the man’s mother, and then goes on her mysterious way, before everyone else returns to their rightful place: immigrants return home, colonial masters return to their countries of origin, the dead (including the beautiful swimmer), those waiting to be born, the sick, the disabled, the criminal are all likened to one another and restored in sleep.</p>
<p>At the end of the poem, all of the restored sleepers begin to awaken, an event described in terms of reconciliation and resurrection:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,
They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed,
The Asiatic and African are hand in hand, the European and American are hand in hand […]</p>
<p>The felon steps forth from the prison, the insane becomes sane, the suffering of sick persons is reliev’d,
The sweatings and fevers stop, the throat that was unsound is sound the lungs of the consumptive are resumed, the poor distress’d head is free […]
Stiflings and passages open, the paralyzed become supple,
The swell’d and convuls’d and congested awake to themselves in condition,
They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the night, and awake. (Canto 8)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Only at the end of the poem does Whitman state that he has been previously afraid to trust himself to the night, but that now he is at peace with the rhythm of night and day, sleeping and waking, which governs the world.</p>
<h2>Poet of the body</h2>
<p>Whitman’s poetry was initially unpopular. Not only was his new verse form considered outlandish, but his insistence on the worthiness of the body put him beyond respectability. <a href="https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1856/poems/34">Emerson originally endorsed him</a>, “greet[ing him] at the beginning of a great career”, but when Whitman published Emerson’s approving letter without permission in the next edition of the book, he put Emerson in an awkward position. </p>
<p>Emerson tried to dissuade Whitman from publishing explicit poems about sex and sexuality, but Whitman did so anyway. The 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass introduced a Children of Adam section, depicting robust heterosexual love, and a Calamus section, which celebrated love between men:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Not heat flames up and consumes,</p>
<p>Not sea-waves hurry in and out,</p>
<p>Not the air delicious and dry, the air of ripe summer, bears lightly along white down-balls of myriads of seeds,</p>
<p>Wafted, sailing gracefully, to drop where they may,</p>
<p>Not these, O none of these more than the flames of me, consuming, burning for his love whom I love […]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There were a few enthusiastic anonymous reviews for Leaves of Grass, but they were written by Whitman. His friends William Douglas O'Connor and John Burroughs allowed Whitman to make bold claims for his poetic achievements under their names. One pamphlet, ostensibly by O'Connor, was called The Good Grey Poet, an image of wholesomeness that went some way toward <a href="https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/tei/anc.00170.html">transforming and boosting Whitman’s image</a>. Eventually, in 1881, Whitman had the opportunity to publish an edition of his book with a major publisher, Osgood. </p>
<p>However, no sooner had 1,500 copies of this definitive edition been printed than the publisher had to withdraw it, under threat of litigation for promoting obscenity. Then, in 1882, Leaves of Grass was banned in Boston. Fortunately, he was taken up by another publisher, and made more than $1000 in royalties on this edition.</p>
<p>Whitman’s overtly homoerotic poems won him friends as well as enemies. The English socialist writer and reformer Edward Carpenter visited him twice, and Oscar Wilde was also pleased to meet him. John Addington Symonds, an English poet and critic, wrote to Whitman over many years, urging him to state explicitly what he meant by the love of comrades. </p>
<p>At last Whitman emphatically disavowed any claim made by Symonds about the possibly sexual nature of the Calamus poems and stated that he had fathered six children. No evidence has been found to substantiate this claim. </p>
<p>Only after his death were Whitman’s <a href="https://poets.org/text/love-letter-peter-doyle-walt-whitman">romantic letters</a> to streetcar conductor Peter Doyle published. Today Whitman is claimed as a champion of same-sex love, although whether or not it was consummated is still a matter of debate and probably unknowable.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276911/original/file-20190529-126271-7r4jd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276911/original/file-20190529-126271-7r4jd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/276911/original/file-20190529-126271-7r4jd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276911/original/file-20190529-126271-7r4jd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276911/original/file-20190529-126271-7r4jd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276911/original/file-20190529-126271-7r4jd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276911/original/file-20190529-126271-7r4jd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/276911/original/file-20190529-126271-7r4jd3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lines from Leaves of Grass inscribed on the paving in Walt Whitman Park, Brooklyn.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/charleylhasa/14346649556/in/photolist-nRLk5Q-fHGrjM-9uBQQW-aFQEr2-nBjwCQ-9KCy7Z-9GcVKu-7ZVmBm-8wsKwZ-76Fuuv-6nTMAn-bPhsS2-Hu7woj-HwubbP-6exs22-oLw4bZ-4F2D2R-YoLkHE-ggVGaY-5D2qtJ-8yv8W7-5D2qn1-4LPCDs-2gboz7-89vZNE-t176N-aitPXy-4WXBXc-5D2qso-2anFeEA-cxrxKb-5Uvx7B-9bmyw-bDuJtq-bDuJrs-9TA6Fn-8cX14K-dstZhv-64sjzB-48qxFk-bEAVLs-bTvDy4-A4U6X-pd5w4K-dQWBVL-a5DgbQ-VT8623-5MNaFr-2dvHGQc-2Lccip">Charley Lhasa/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Whitman today</h2>
<p>In one of the appraisals that Whitman ghost-wrote, he claimed to be better appreciated across the Atlantic than he was in America. There is truth in this: a censored English edition had found its way to a band of fervent supporters in industrial Bolton, near Manchester. They sent him a birthday message and ten pounds, and eventually two of them, J. W. Wallace and Dr John Johnson, went to visit the poet, by then gravely ill. </p>
<p>A lively transatlantic correspondence ensued that lasted long beyond the death of the poet and the two leaders of the <a href="http://msr-archives.rutgers.edu/archives/Issue%2016/essays/dinapoli.htm">Bolton Whitman reading group</a>. Whitman’s birthday is still celebrated with a walk led by Bolton Socialist Club members.</p>
<p>The transformation of Whitman from shunned outsider to national poet-hero happened in fits and starts. Whitman’s own critical efforts and those of his transatlantic disciples began it. Then Whitman’s “spiritual son”, Horace Traubel, wrote a nine-volume work called With Walt Whitman in Camden, published between 1906 and 1996, designed to <a href="https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/WWWiC/">make Whitman’s thought more generally known</a>.</p>
<p>Wealthy collectors of Americana began to exhibit the various editions of Whitman’s books. Readers began to appreciate Whitman’s insistence on the body and the value he placed on manly love. Whitman’s poetry began to be studied wherever American literature was taught, and he was taken up by popular culture.</p>
<p>Whitman’s birthplace in Huntington, New York, is now a museum, close to the Walt Whitman Shops on Walt Whitman Road. You can take a tour through his last residence – the only house he ever owned – in Camden, New Jersey. </p>
<p>He is now considered the father of free verse (although he was not the first poet to use it), the father of modern poetry, and, according to one critic, the “<a href="http://www.hnn.us/roundup/entries/13478.html">imaginative father and mother</a>” of every American, whether a poet or not. </p>
<p>Whitman is also recognised with parks in Washington DC and <a href="https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/walt-whitman-park/history">New York</a>. Among the most moving tributes is the Dupont Circle train station in Washington DC, which contains an inscription from his poem “The Wound Dresser”. </p>
<p>Originally written about the Civil War, these lines in their new context become <a href="https://readersunbound.com/2015/02/11/walt-whitman-discovery-in-washington-dc/">a tribute to those who cared for sufferers during the AIDS crisis</a>. One senses that the poet would be gratified at last to be given the recognition craved by this generous, embracing imaginative personality.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/116055/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carolyn Masel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Walt Whitman is perhaps America’s most admired poet. His work, now praised for its themes of equality and democracy, was once shunned for its experimental verse and discussion of sexuality.Carolyn Masel, Lecturer in Literature, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/689282016-11-21T10:44:09Z2016-11-21T10:44:09ZFive extraordinary poems that inspired Bob Dylan<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146593/original/image-20161118-19334-1q11cmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dylan: not leaning on his guitar.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/badosa/9488666868/in/photolist-fstU5C-oaGNHR-DL9Am-6Qai86-fstT8N-JFJQA-fseydg-fstSNo-9BQ2o8-4V4khQ-9UQLyR-9UQLiV-9UQLMX-9UQLtz-3wjGj6-aEsQZb-59Efn1-fsu1tq-yr5HEa-7YEeyU-c1F3Wh-gafvUx-5ijYuf-5ifFrv-5izouH-5iDEzo-5iDEUb-5ijYvs-5ijYpW-5iDESf-5ijYoh-5izosc-5ijYs7-5iDEKu-JFJQy-5iDEQh-55W45D-3dm9ZV-dNFktJ-dNzJtp-ix9YEb-3xmfsP-aCuwTi-a218Ht-aCxcNw-aCxcJA-aCuwFc-KMJj4-KMxwq-dWYCP">Xavier Badosa via Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Robert Lowell said that Bob Dylan wasn’t a poet because he “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GvLq2Xd8zjkC&pg=PA170&lpg=PA170&dq=robert+lowell+bob+dylan+hamilton+leans+crutch+guitar&source=bl&ots=YWnJMuqDC0&sig=eiAy0475WGkIeKATo2Rg3ohL4hY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjRlvbpjK3QAhUqIsAKHXmHBccQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=robert%20lowell%20bob%20dylan%20hamilton%20leans%20crutch%20guitar&f=false">leaned on the crutch of his guitar</a>”. The Nobel committee clearly disagree – they awarded him the <a href="http://www.nme.com/news/music/1858001-1858001">Nobel Prize in Literature</a>. Indeed, Dylan has leaned on poetry more than any other musician, before or since. Here are five poets who provided him with inspiration.</p>
<h2>Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)</h2>
<p>Baudelaire’s use of hashish, dissatisfaction with the uptight middle-classes, and celebration of prostitutes, visionaries and outsiders produced a poetry that would have resonated with the Dylan of Mr Tambourine Man.</p>
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<p>Baudelaire’s <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/anywhere-out-of-the-world/">Anywhere Out of this World</a> shares and anticipates Dylan’s pot-fuelled, visionary lyrics of the mid-1960s. Baudelaire writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Let us go farther still to the extreme end of the Baltic; or farther still from life, if that is possible…<br>
At last my soul explodes, and wisely cries out to me: “No matter where! No matter where! As long as it’s out of the world!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And it seems Dylan wasn’t leaning very heavily on the crutch of his guitar when in <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/mr-tambourine-man/">Mr Tambourine Man</a> he wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free<br>
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands<br>
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves<br>
Let me forget about today until tomorrow…</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Walt Whitman (1819-1892)</h2>
<p>Walt Whitman’s inclusive, democratic vision of America would have been of enormous appeal to the young Dylan. The 1856 edition of his <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27494.Leaves_of_Grass">Leaves of Grass</a> presents a poet – open-shirted, unshaven, sexually assured – that would not have been out of place on any of Dylan’s 1960s album covers. Whitman’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45472">I Sing the Body Electric</a> – with its unknowing nod towards Dylan’s move from folk troubadour to electric bohemian – opens:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I sing the body electric,<br>
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,<br>
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,<br>
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>His extended, visionary lines anticipated and inspired Dylan’s long lyrics from <a href="http://bobdylan.com/albums/hard-rain/">Hard Rain</a> through <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/desolation-row/">Desolation Row</a> and provided a model that the young singer was keen to follow.</p>
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<h2>Andre Breton (1896-1966)</h2>
<p>Andre Breton was the figurehead of the <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/surrealism">Surrealists</a>; a group of writers who gathered in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. The Surrealists’ surprising, erotic images of women find resonances in Dylan’s romantic lyrics. Breton’s <a href="http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/expansive-poetics-97-andre-breton-2.html">Free Union</a> is a list poem in which a love of language and of woman overwhelms the reader with poetry and erotic intent. It begins:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My wife with the hair of a wood fire<br>
With the thoughts of heat lightning<br>
With the waist of an hourglass<br>
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dylan’s images of love and of women are rarely commented upon. If they are, he is often mocked for the surrealism of his lyrics. <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/love-minus-zero-no-limit/">Love Minus Zero / No Limit</a> contains the verse:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The cloak and dagger dangles<br>
Madams light the candles<br>
In ceremonies of the horsemen<br>
Even the pawn must hold a grudge<br>
Statues made of matchsticks<br>
Crumble into one another<br>
My love winks, she does not bother<br>
She knows too much to argue or to judge </p>
</blockquote>
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<p>If Dylan is at fault here, then so is an entire literary and artistic movement. In his greatest moments, Dylan nailed surrealism and love as well as any of its most important poets.</p>
<h2>Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)</h2>
<p>One can only imagine how the teenage, Jewish Dylan must have marvelled at the geeky, bespectacled beat poet <a href="http://allenginsberg.org">Ginsberg</a>, and the impact of his poem <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49303">Howl</a>. Dylan’s <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/hard-rains-gonna-fall/">A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall</a> recognises Ginsberg’s “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”,
and recycles them into “I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken / I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.”</p>
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<h2>Langston Hughes (1902-1967)</h2>
<p>One of the key poets of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/langston-hughes">Hughes</a> was responsible for the integration of jazz and black art forms into poetry. In <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46548">Harlem</a> he uses short, rhyming lines that anticipate the proto-rap of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. Here is the complete poem:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What happens to a dream deferred? </p>
<p>Does it dry up<br>
like a raisin in the sun?<br>
Or fester like a sore—<br>
And then run?<br>
Does it stink like rotten meat?<br>
Or crust and sugar over—<br>
like a syrupy sweet? </p>
<p>Maybe it just sags<br>
like a heavy load. </p>
<p>Or does it explode? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bob Dylan – <a href="http://bobdylan.com/songs/subterranean-homesick-blues/">“on the pavement / thinking about the government”</a> – transformed popular culture in the 1960s. To many, his lyrics seemed to come out of nowhere. If all you had been doing was listening to Sinatra, they did. </p>
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<p>For the bohemians who had been hanging out in coffee-houses and paying attention to the poets, however, all he was doing was doing what poets have always been doing: making it new, and telling it like it is.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68928/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Atkins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>He was criticised for leaning on the crutch of his guitar, but if Dylan leaned on anything, it was his love of poetry.Tim Atkins, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of East LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/441742015-07-03T12:57:20Z2015-07-03T12:57:20ZWhy we should still be reading Democracy in America<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87165/original/image-20150702-11318-3seq4z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The young aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, sketch by an unknown artist.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville#/media/File:Alexis_de_Tocqueville.jpg">Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Editor’s note: On the occasion of Independence Day, we felt it appropriate to reprint, from our Australian edition, the remarks of University of Sydney political thinker and writer <a href="http://www.johnkeane.net/">John Keane</a> on why Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America – 180 years on from its first publication – is still worth reading, whatever one’s perspective. The remarks were originally delivered as a lecture to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Scholars Program at the University of Sydney, April 24 2015</em>. </p>
<p>Alexis de Tocqueville’s four-volume Democracy in America (1835–1840) is commonly said to be among the greatest works of 19th-century political writing. Its daring conjectures, elegant prose, formidable length and narrative complexity certainly make it a masterpiece, yet exactly those qualities have together ensured, through time, that opinions greatly differ about the roots of its greatness. </p>
<p>Some observers cautiously mine the text for its fresh insights on such perennial themes as liberty of the press, the tyranny of the majority and civil society; or they focus on such topics as why it is that modern democracies are vulnerable to “commercial panics” and why they simultaneously value equality, reduce the threat of revolution and grow complacent. </p>
<p>Some readers of the text treat its author as a “<a href="http://au.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405160837.html">classical liberal</a>” who loved parliamentary government and loathed the extremes of democracy. More often, the text is treated as a brilliant grand commentary on the decisive historical significance for old Europe of the rise of the new American republic, which was soon to become a world empire. </p>
<p>Some observers, very often American, push this interpretation to the limit. They think of Democracy in America in almost nationalist terms: for them, it is a <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442222779/American-Exceptionalism-The-Origins-History-and-Future-of-the-Nation%27s-Greatest-Strength">lavish hymn</a> to the United States, a celebration of its emerging authority in the world, an ode to its 19th-century greatness and future 20th-century global dominance. </p>
<p>How should we make sense of these conflicting interpretations? </p>
<p>Each arguably suffers serious flaws, but at the outset it’s important to recognize that the act of reading past texts is always an exercise in selection. There are no “true” and “faithful” readings of what others have written. </p>
<p>Readers like to say that they have “really grasped” the intended meanings of dead authors, whose texts belong to a context, but “full disclosure” of that kind is forbidden to the living. Hemmed in by language and horizons of time and space, reading is always a stylising of past reality. Just as walking is a pale imitation of dancing, and dancing an exaggerated form of walking, so interpretations frame past realities. They are acts of narration. Acts of reading past texts are always time- and space-bound interpretations and, as one of my teachers, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Method">Hans-Georg Gadamer</a>, liked to remark, all such interpretations of past texts turn out to be misinterpretations. </p>
<p>That is why differences of interpretation are not only to be expected but, in order to prevent any one of them becoming dominant, to be welcomed, especially when they push beyond familiar horizons, toward “wild” perspectives that force us to rethink things that we have so far taken for granted. </p>
<h2>Democratic literature</h2>
<p>It is the spirit of “wild reading” that infuses the following notes on Tocqueville’s “classic” work. </p>
<p>When approached 180 years after its first publication as a four-volume set, Democracy in America teaches us more than a few things about the subject of democracy. But what exactly can we learn from it? </p>
<p>It may seem farfetched, but the first striking thing about the text is not just that it is the first-ever lengthy analytic treatment in any language of the subject of democracy but a treatment whose narrative form both mirrors and amplifies (“mimics”) the dynamic openness of its subject matter: a way of life and a method of handling power Tocqueville repeatedly calls democracy.</p>
<p>Democracy in America is a democratic text. Striking is its openness, its willingness to entertain paradoxes and juggle opposites, its powerful sense of adventure constructed from extensive field notes gathered by means of a grand adventure. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87197/original/image-20150702-11345-4yr2dk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87197/original/image-20150702-11345-4yr2dk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87197/original/image-20150702-11345-4yr2dk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87197/original/image-20150702-11345-4yr2dk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87197/original/image-20150702-11345-4yr2dk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87197/original/image-20150702-11345-4yr2dk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87197/original/image-20150702-11345-4yr2dk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87197/original/image-20150702-11345-4yr2dk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alexis de Tocqueville traveled throughout the United States to study American society.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Conversation US</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It may not seem obvious, but this sense of adventure has everything to do with the spirit of “democracy.” Democracy in America brilliantly captures and mimics in literary form the growth of an open, experimental society, a dynamic political order deeply aware of its own originality. </p>
<p>Its grasp of these qualities of democracy was undoubtedly nurtured by Tocqueville’s peripatetic journey through the young American republic. It opened his eyes, widened his horizons and changed his mind about democracy. </p>
<p>In 1831, for nine short but action-filled months, the 26-year-old young French aristocrat (1805–1859) traveled through the United States. Accompanied by his colleague and friend <a href="http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300153828">Gustave de Beaumont</a>, he ventured almost everywhere. </p>
<p>Like a well-briefed tourist, he rode on steamboats (one of which sunk), found himself trapped by blizzards, sampled the local cuisine, and “slept rough” in log cabins. He found time for research and for rest, and for conversation, despite his imperfect English, with useful or prominent Americans, among them John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster. </p>
<p>Setting out from New York, he traveled upstate to Buffalo, then through the frontier, as it was then called, to Michigan and Wisconsin. He sojourned two weeks in Canada, from where he descended to Boston and Philadelphia and Baltimore. Next he went west, to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati; then south to Nashville, Memphis and New Orleans; then north through the southeastern states to the capital, Washington; and at last back to New York, where he returned by packet to Le Havre, France. </p>
<p>At the beginning of his journey, in New York, where he sojourned from May 11 for some six weeks, Tocqueville was openly hesitant about this bustling market society whose system of democratic government was still in its infancy. “Everything I see fails to excite my enthusiasm,” he wrote in his journal, “because I attribute more to the nature of things than to human will.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87201/original/image-20150702-11335-xcae9g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87201/original/image-20150702-11335-xcae9g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87201/original/image-20150702-11335-xcae9g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87201/original/image-20150702-11335-xcae9g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87201/original/image-20150702-11335-xcae9g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87201/original/image-20150702-11335-xcae9g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87201/original/image-20150702-11335-xcae9g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87201/original/image-20150702-11335-xcae9g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chateau de Tocqueville today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chateau_de_Tocqueville.JPG">BettyBouv'</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Talk of the God-given nature of things appears from time to time between the lines of Democracy in America. Seemingly still under the influence of the political false starts of his native France, Tocqueville’s “nature of things” principle stands in some tension with its sense of adventure, with its feeling for the novelty of democracy as a transformative experience. </p>
<p>But Tocqueville, the slightly built son of a count from Normandy – the <a href="http://chateaudetocqueville.com/en/the-castle/">Château de Tocqueville</a> still stands, within sight of the harbour of Cherbourg – was soon to change his mind about democracy. </p>
<p>Sometime during his stay in Boston (7 September – 3 October 1831), Tocqueville became a convert to the American way of life. He began to talk of “a great democratic revolution” now sweeping the world from its American heartlands. He was persuaded that “the advent of democracy as a governing power in the world’s affairs, universal and irresistible, was at hand.” He became convinced that “the time was coming” when democracy would triumph in Europe, as it was doing in America. </p>
<p>The future was America. It was therefore imperative to understand its strengths and weaknesses, he thought. </p>
<p>And so, on January 12 1832, just before boarding his packet for France, he sketched plans to bring to the French public a work about democracy in America.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If royalists could see the internal functioning of this well-ordered republic the deep respect its people profess for their acquired rights, the power of those rights over crowds, the religion of law, the real and effective liberty people enjoy, the true rule of the majority, the easy and natural way things proceed, they would realise that they apply a single name to diverse forms of government which have nothing in common. Our republicans would feel that what we have called the Republic was never more than an unclassifiable monster…covered in blood and mud, clothed in the rages of antiquity’s quarrels. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tocqueville’s epiphany produced a string of extraordinary insights, as well as paradoxes. </p>
<p>Consider his claim in Democracy in America that the political form known as democracy, all things considered, extinguishes the aesthetic dimension of life. It produces no lasting works of art, no poetry, no fine literature. Lacking a leisure class, he reasoned, the young American democracy cultivated people with practical minds.</p>
<p>“The language, the dress, and the daily actions of men in democracies are repugnant to conceptions of the ideal,” he wrote. The whole “philosophical method” of democracy is pragmatic, centered on the effort of individuals to make sense of their world by harnessing their own individual understanding of things. Even in matters of religion, “everyone shuts himself up tightly within himself and insists upon judging the world from there.” </p>
<p>The often-beautiful narrative prose, self-conscious reflection and fragmented “open text” structure of Democracy in America contradicts this thesis. </p>
<p>Democracy in America is arguably a great work of modern democratic literature, a highly engaging and thought-provoking text that markedly stands at right angles to the dull-witted science of politics that is today too often dominant in the American academy and elsewhere. </p>
<p>The point can be put in a different way: Tocqueville positively contradicted himself. He failed to foresee the many ways in which the young American democracy, with its palpable ethos of equality with liberty manifested in simple body language, tobacco-chewing customs and easy manners, would give rise to self-consciously democratic art and literature. </p>
<p>Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), a celebration of the potential boundlessness of the American experiment with democracy and of the power of the poet to rupture conventional language, springs to mind. So also does the greatest of all 19th-century American novels, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), a tale that warned against the hubris and self-destruction that awaits all those who act as if the world contained no boundaries, rules or moral limits. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87203/original/image-20150702-11342-cmli8k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87203/original/image-20150702-11342-cmli8k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87203/original/image-20150702-11342-cmli8k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87203/original/image-20150702-11342-cmli8k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87203/original/image-20150702-11342-cmli8k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87203/original/image-20150702-11342-cmli8k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87203/original/image-20150702-11342-cmli8k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87203/original/image-20150702-11342-cmli8k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">One of the original copies of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1860_LeavesOfGrass_Thayer_Eldridge_NYPL.jpeg">Thayer and Eldridge</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tocqueville’s Democracy in America stands tall among these “classics.” It is in fact their progenitor. </p>
<h2>Contingency</h2>
<p>But there’s more to say about Democracy in America: much more, in fact. </p>
<p>Democracy in America is a genuine breakthrough in the understanding of democracy as a unique political form, as a whole way of life that is fundamentally transformative of people’s sense of being in the world. </p>
<p>Standing behind Tocqueville’s fascination with democracy is his awareness of its profound role in shaping modern times by stirring up people’s sense of the contingency of things. </p>
<p>The four-volume work is still regarded, justifiably, as one of the great books about the subject, in no small measure because at a crucial moment in the democratic experiment in America, Tocqueville managed to put his finger on several sources of its dynamic energy. </p>
<p>For Tocqueville, it is not just capitalism and the law-enforcing territorial state that define modern times. The “great democratic revolution” marks off modernity from the prior world structured by what he repeatedly calls “aristocracy.” Democracy is a <em>sui generis</em> but seemingly irreversible feature of the modern age. </p>
<p>It is true there are more than a few hints that Tocqueville, backed by the belief that God stands in favour of democracy, is tempted by evolutionary thinking, of the kind (in much more secular form) that later gripped Fukuyama’s grand <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man">generalisation</a> of the 1776 revolution as the beginning of the end of history. </p>
<p>Yet in contrast to Fukuyama and others, Tocqueville insisted there is no certain progress at the level of “general evolution.” Tocqueville emphasises to his readers that democracy challenges settled ways of thinking and speaking and acting. It reveals that humans are capable of transcending themselves. </p>
<p>Really striking is Tocqueville’s grasp of the way democracy breaks down life’s certainties and spreads a lived sense of the mutability of the power relations through which people live their lives. For him, democracy is the twin of contingency. </p>
<p>The point is not often noted by readers of Tocqueville, but it is of fundamental importance when trying to come to terms with the “spirit” of democracy.</p>
<p>What we learn from Democracy in America is that democracy nudges and broadens people’s horizons. It tutors their sense of pluralism. It prods them into taking greater responsibility for how, when and why they act as they do. Democracies encourage people’s suspicions of power deemed “natural.” Citizens come to learn that “perpetual mutability” is their lot, and that they must keep an eye on power and its representatives because prevailing power relationships are not “natural,” but up for grabs.</p>
<p>In other words, democracy promotes something of a Gestalt switch in the perception of power. The metaphysical idea of an objective, out-there-at-a-distance “reality” is weakened; so, too, is the presumption that “reality” is stubborn and somehow superior to power. The fabled distinction between what people can see with their eyes and what they are told about the emperor’s clothes breaks down.</p>
<p>“Reality,” including the “reality” promoted by the powerful, comes to be understood as always “produced reality,” a matter of interpretation – and the power to seduce others into conformity by forcing particular interpretations of the world down others’ throats. </p>
<h2>The spirit of equality</h2>
<p>What are the wellsprings of this shared sense of contingency? Why does democracy tend to interrupt certainties, impeach them, enable people to see that things could be other than they presently are? </p>
<p>Tocqueville might have been expected to say that because periodic elections stir things up they are the prime cause of the shared sense of the contingency of power relations. </p>
<p>Not so.</p>
<p>Tocqueville actually thought that elections trigger herd instincts among citizens. He worried that “faith in public opinion” might well become “a species of religion, and the majority its ministering prophet.” </p>
<p>Though frequent elections “keep society in a feverish excitement and give a continual instability to public affairs,” periodic elections are not seen by Tocqueville to be the core dynamic of democracy. The proximate cause of the “spirit” of restlessness of democracy lies elsewhere: it is above all traceable to the way democracy unleashes struggles by groups and individuals for greater equality. </p>
<p>Tocqueville reminds us in Democracy in America that the core principle of democracy is the public commitment to equality among its citizens. The reminder seems lost these days on most politicians, political parties and governments. </p>
<p>It’s true that Tocqueville showed little interest in the finery of contested understandings of the meaning of equality. He was no doubt aware of Aristotle’s famous distinction between “numerical equality” and “proportional equality,” a form of equal treatment of others who are considered as equals in some or other important respect, but not others. </p>
<p>Yet Tocqueville openly sided with Aristotle’s view that democrats “think that as they are equal they ought to be equal in all things.” </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87207/original/image-20150702-11345-ejyl5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87207/original/image-20150702-11345-ejyl5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87207/original/image-20150702-11345-ejyl5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87207/original/image-20150702-11345-ejyl5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87207/original/image-20150702-11345-ejyl5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87207/original/image-20150702-11345-ejyl5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87207/original/image-20150702-11345-ejyl5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87207/original/image-20150702-11345-ejyl5o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘This, then, is what the just is – the proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion.’ Book V, Nichomachean Ethics.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aristotle_Altemps_Inv8575.jpg">Ludovisi Collection</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Equality is for him not the equal right of citizens to be different. Equality is sameness. Proof of its allure was the way the new American democracy unleashed constant struggles against the various inequalities inherited from old Europe, thus proving that they were neither necessary nor desirable. </p>
<p>Democracy, argued Tocqueville, spreads passion for the equalisation of power, property and status among people. They come to feel that current inequalities are purely contingent, and so potentially alterable by human action itself. </p>
<p>Tocqueville was fascinated by this trend towards equalisation. In the realm of law and government, he noted, everything tends to dispute and uncertainty. The grip of sentimental tradition, absolute morality and religious faith in the power of the divine weakens. </p>
<p>Growing numbers of Americans consequently harbour “instinctive incredulity of the supernatural.” They also look upon the power of politicians and governments with a jealous eye. Government structured by the good blood of monarchs is anathema. They are prone to suspect or curse those who wield power, and thereby they are impatient with arbitrary rule. </p>
<p>In the field of what Tocqueville calls “political society,” government and its laws gradually lose their divinity and charm. They come to be regarded as simply expedient for this or that purpose, and as properly based on the voluntary consent of citizens endowed with equal civil and political rights. </p>
<p>The spell of absolute monarchy is forever broken. Political rights are extended gradually from the lucky privileged few to those who once suffered discrimination; and government policies and laws are subject constantly to public grumbling, legal challenges and alteration. </p>
<p>Thanks to democracy, something similar happens in the field of social life, or so Tocqueville proposed. </p>
<p>The American democracy is subject to a permanent “social revolution.” Himself a self-confessed sentimental believer in the old patriarchal principle that “the sources of a married woman’s happiness are in the home of her husband,” Tocqueville nevertheless pointed to a profound change in the relationship between the sexes in American society. </p>
<p>Democracy gradually destroys or modifies “that great inequality of man and woman, which has appeared hitherto to be rooted eternally in nature.” The more general point he wanted to make is this: under democratic conditions, people’s definitions of social life as “natural” or “taken for granted” are gradually replaced by self-consciously chosen arrangements that favour equality as sameness. </p>
<p>Democracy speeds up the “denaturing” of social life. It becomes subject to something like a permanent democratisation. </p>
<p>This is how: if certain social groups defend their privileges, of property or income, for instance, then pressure grows for extending those privileges to other social groups. </p>
<p>“And why not?”, the protagonists of equality ask, adding in the same breath: “Why should the privileged be treated as if they were different, or better?” After each new practical concession to the principle of equality, new demands from those who are socially excluded force yet further concessions from the privileged. </p>
<p>Eventually the point is reached where the social privileges enjoyed by a few are redistributed, in the form of universal social entitlements. </p>
<p>That at least was the theory. On the basis of his travels and observations, Tocqueville predicted that American democracy would in future have to confront a fundamental dilemma. </p>
<p>Put at its simplest, it was this: if privileged Americans try, in the name of such-and-such a principle, to restrict social and political privileges to a few, then their opponents will be tempted to organise themselves, for the purpose of pointing out that such-and-such privileges are by no means “natural,” or God-given, and are therefore an open embarrassment to democracy. </p>
<p>Democratic mechanisms, said Tocqueville, stimulate a passion for social and political equality that they cannot easily satisfy. </p>
<p>He thought there was much truth in the view of <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/r/rousseau/jean_jacques/r864s/complete.html">Jean-Jacques Rousseau</a> that democratic perfection is reserved for the deities. The earthly struggle for equalisation is never fully attainable. It is always unfinished. Democracy lives forever in the future. There is no such thing as a pure democracy and there never will be a pure democracy. </p>
<p>Democracy (as <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=qs1JNGtbjQgC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=Rogues,+%22The+Reason+of+the+Strongest&source=bl&ots=JFhPXkfj39&sig=fT_c9G9l7m1z64VGzB_r5r9OeD4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xA0-VfLpAqbUmgXau4GYCg&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Rogues%2C%20%22The%20Reason%20of%20the%20Strongest&f=false">Jacques Derrida</a> later put things) is always to come. “This complete equality,” wrote Tocqueville, “slips from the hands of the people at the very moment when they think they have grasped it and flies, as Pascal says, an eternal flight.” </p>
<p>The less powerful ranks of society, including those without the vote, are especially caught in the grip of this leveling dynamic, or so Tocqueville thought. </p>
<p>Irritated by the fact of their subordination, agitated by the possibility of overcoming their condition, they rather easily grow frustrated by the uncertainty of achieving equality. Their initial enthusiasm and hope give way to disappointment, but at some point the frustration they experience renews their commitment to the struggle for equality. </p>
<p>This “perpetual movement of society” fills the world of American democracy with the questioning of absolutes, with radical scepticism about inequality, and with an impatient love of experimentation, with new ways of doing things, for the sake of equality. </p>
<p>America found itself caught up in a democratic maelstrom. Nothing is certain or inviolable, except the passionate, dizzying struggle for social and political equality. “No sooner do you set foot upon American soil then you are stunned by a type of tumult,” reported Tocqueville, stung by the same excitement. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A confused clamour is heard everywhere, and a thousand voices simultaneously demand the satisfaction of their social needs. Everything is in motion around you…Here the people of one town district are meeting to decide upon the building of a church; there the election of a representative is taking place; a little farther on, the delegates of a district are hastening to town in order to consult about some local improvements; elsewhere, the labourers of a village quit their ploughs to deliberate upon a road or public school project.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He concluded:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Citizens call meetings for the sole purpose of declaring their disapprobation of the conduct of government; while in other assemblies citizens salute the authorities of the day as the fathers of their country, or form societies which regard drunkenness as the principal cause of the evils of the state, and solemnly pledge themselves to the principle of temperance.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Civil society</h2>
<p>Tocqueville was certainly impressed by “civil society.”</p>
<p>He was not the first to use the term in its modern sense (see my earliest works <a href="http://www.johnkeane.net/portfolio_page/democracy-and-civil-society/">Democracy and Civil Society</a> and <a href="http://www.johnkeane.net/portfolio_page/civil-society-and-the-state/">Civil Society and the State</a>), but he did find the new American republic brimming with many different forms of civil association, and he therefore pondered their importance for consolidating democracy. </p>
<p>Tocqueville was the first political writer to bring together the newly invented modern understanding of civil society with the old Greek category of democracy; and he was the first to say that a healthy democracy makes room for civil associations that function as schools of public spirit, permanently open to all, within which citizens become acquainted with others, learn their rights and duties as equals, and press home their concerns, sometimes in opposition to government, so preventing the tyranny of minorities by herd-like majorities through the ballot box. </p>
<p>He noted that these civil associations were small-scale affairs, and yet, within their confines, he emphasised how individual citizens regularly “socialise” themselves by raising their concerns beyond their selfish, tetchy, narrowly private goals. Through their participation in civil associations, they come to feel themselves to be citizens. They draw the conclusion that in order to obtain others’ support, they must often lend them their cooperation, as equals.</p>
<p>Tocqueville’s account of democracy in America shows, at a poignant moment in the 19th century, just how popular thinking had become self-conscious of the novelty of civil society under democratic conditions. </p>
<p>Tocqueville called upon his readers to understand democracy as a brand new type of self-government defined not just by elections, parties and government by representatives, but also by the extensive use of civil society institutions that prevent political despotism by placing a limit, in the name of equality, upon the scope and power of government itself. Tocqueville also pointed out that these civil associations had radical social implications. </p>
<p>The “great democratic revolution” that was under way in America showed that it was the enemy of taken-for-granted privileges in all spheres of life.</p>
<p>Under democratic conditions, civil society never stands still. It is a sphere of restlessness, civic agitation, refusals to cooperate, struggles for improved conditions, the incubator of visions of a more equal society. </p>
<h2>Pathologies of democracy</h2>
<p>Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is worth reading for yet one more reason: it is the first-ever analysis of democracy to dissect democracy’s pathologies, and to do so in a manner that remained basically loyal to the spirit and substance of democracy as a normative ideal. </p>
<p>Readers of Democracy in America often brush aside this point. While they admit that Tocqueville was well aware that democracy is prone to self-contradiction and self-destruction, they note that he tended to exaggerate the momentum and geographic extent of the busy leveling process that was under way in America. </p>
<p>According to this view, Tocqueville, who was blessed with a remarkable sixth sense of probing the difference between appearances and realities, sometimes, when looking at life in the United States, swallowed whole its own best self-image. </p>
<p>He wasn’t the only 19th-century visitor to be charmed by the new democracy. </p>
<p>Consider the <a href="http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Italian_Opinion_on_America_As_Revealed_b.html?id=716QAAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Italian fashion</a> of visiting the new democratic republic, to see what it was like. </p>
<p>“Hurrah to you, oh great Country!,” wrote one traveler, shortly after Tocqueville had published his great work. “The United States is a free land, essentially because its sons drink together the milk of respect for each others’ opinions…this is what makes them beautiful, and their air more easily breathable for us who are thirsty for freedom from old Europe, where the liberties we have gained with so much blood and pain have for the most part been suffocated by our mutual intolerance.” </p>
<p>Another Italian traveler expressed similar excitement. “Ah, this is the democracy that I love, that I dream of and yearn for,” he wrote, contrasting it with the “presumption and snobbishness” guarded back home by the “people of high rank.” </p>
<p>The same visitor was struck by the way American citizens casually wore caps and hats, how they spurned moustaches, chewed tobacco and liked to chew the fat, hands in pockets. </p>
<p>“Simple people, simple furniture, simple greetings,” he wrote, adding that Americans “extend you their hand, ask you what you need, and quickly respond.” Still another visitor brimmed with exuberance. “There is no lying by officials. Truth, always truth. No prejudices, no red tape. From every street corner come the cries of a people intoxicated with hope and immortal charity: ‘Forward! Forward!’.” </p>
<p>He added an immodest prediction: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Just as Rome impressed the seal of its laws and its cosmopolitan culture on the old world of the Mediterranean, and Romanised Christianity, so the federated democracy of the United States will prove to be the guiding model for the next political phase of humanity. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Slavery</h2>
<p>Tocqueville was much less sanguine about the fledgling American democracy. </p>
<p>Many of his observations were both astute and prescient: for instance, concerning the grave political problem of slavery. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87219/original/image-20150702-11327-ojjljc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87219/original/image-20150702-11327-ojjljc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87219/original/image-20150702-11327-ojjljc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87219/original/image-20150702-11327-ojjljc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87219/original/image-20150702-11327-ojjljc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87219/original/image-20150702-11327-ojjljc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87219/original/image-20150702-11327-ojjljc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87219/original/image-20150702-11327-ojjljc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A memorial to slavery.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mvjaf/353181520">Murky1/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tocqueville was perhaps the first writer to show at length why modern representative democracy could not live with slavery, as classical assembly-based democracy had managed to do, admittedly with some discomfort. </p>
<p>He highlighted how the “calamity” of slavery had resulted in a terrible subdivision of social and political life. Black people in America were neither in nor of civil society. They were objects of gross incivility. Legal and informal penalties against racial intermarriage were severe. In those states where slavery had been abolished, black people who dared to vote, or to serve on juries, were threatened with murder.</p>
<p>There was segregation and deep inequality in education:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the theatres gold cannot procure a seat for the servile race beside their former masters; in the hospitals they lie apart; and although they are allowed to invoke the same God as the whites, it must be at a different altar and in their own churches, with their own clergy. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Prejudice even haunted the dead. “When the Negro dies, his bones are cast aside, and the distinction of condition prevails even in the equality of death.” </p>
<p>Lurking within these racist customs was a disturbing paradox, Tocqueville observed. </p>
<p>The prejudice directed at black people, he noted, increases in proportion to their formal emancipation. Slavery in America was in this sense much worse than in ancient Greece, where the emancipation of slaves for military purposes was encouraged by the fact that their skin colour was often the same as that of their masters.</p>
<p>Both within and outside the institutions of American slavery, by contrast, blacks were made to suffer terrible bigotry, “the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of colour,” a prejudice that drew strength from false talk of the “natural” superiority of whites. </p>
<p>Such bigotry cast a long shadow over the future of American democracy, to the point where it now seemed to be faced not only with the equally unpalatable options of retaining slavery or organised bigotry, but also with the outbreak of “the most horrible of civil wars.” </p>
<p>Tocqueville’s political forecast was understandably gloomy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Attacked by Christianity as unjust and by political economy as prejudicial, and now contrasted with democratic liberty and the intelligence of our age, slavery cannot survive. By the act of the master, or by the will of the slave, it will cease; and in either case great calamities may be expected to ensue. If liberty be refused to the Negroes of the South, they will in the end forcibly seize it for themselves; if it be given, they will long abuse it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tocqueville’s white-skinned suspicion of black people should be noted, as should his accurate spotting of the poisonous contradiction between slavery and the spirit of modern representative democracy. </p>
<p>He was right as well to be anxious about the magnitude of the problem. </p>
<p>By 1820, at least 10 million African slaves had arrived in the New World. Some 400,000 had settled in North America, but their numbers had multiplied rapidly, to the point where all the states south of the Mason-Dixon line were slave societies, in the full sense of the term. </p>
<p>in New England, where there were comparatively few slaves, the economy was rooted in the slave trade with the West Indies. As David Brion Davis has pointed out (in <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674019850">Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery</a>), Afro-Americans did the hard and dirty work of the democratic republic. They cleared forests, turned the soil, planted and tendered and harvested the exportable crops that brought great prosperity to the slave-owning classes. </p>
<p>So successful was the system of slavery that after 1819, Southern politicians and landowners and their supporters within the federal government agitated for its universal adoption. </p>
<p>As a mode of production, and as a whole way of life, slavery went on the warpath, as Abraham Lincoln made clear in his not inaccurate claim that slave power was hellbent on taking over the whole country, North as well as South.</p>
<p>The aggressiveness of slave power during the 1820s and 1830s disturbed the dreams of some Americans; it forced them to conclude that the American polity required a refounding. </p>
<p>Reasoning with their democratic hearts, they spotted that slavery was incompatible with the ideals of free and equal citizenship. These same opponents of slavery were to some degree aware of a contradiction that lurked within the contradiction.</p>
<p>The problem, simply put, was whether or not the abolition of slavery could be done democratically; that is, by peaceful means such as petitioning and decisions by Congress, or whether military force would be needed to defeat slavery’s defenders. </p>
<p>In the end, as we know, armed force decided, bringing with it four years of terrible misery. An ugly struggle between two huge armies that locked horns in 10,000 battles, the Civil War was the first recorded war between two aspiring representative democracies, whose political elites were prone to think of themselves as defenders of two incompatible definitions of democracy. </p>
<p>The conflict was in a way a clash between two different historical eras. The military crushing of the southern fantasy of Greek democracy, in the name of a God-given vision of representative democracy, proved costly. Death, disability and destitution ruined hundreds of thousands of households, on both sides. Proportionate to the US’ 2012 population, <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17604991">7.5 million soldiers</a> died in the conflict, two-thirds from neglect and disease. </p>
<h2>Despotism</h2>
<p>Perhaps the most profound intuition of Democracy in America has to do with the long-term problem of <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/resources/reports-and-publications/13902-lecture-the-new-despotisms-of-the-21st-century">despotism in the age of democracy</a>. The complex story it tells arguably remains highly relevant for our times. </p>
<p>Tocqueville was acutely aware of the dangers posed by the rise, from within the heart of the new civil society, of capitalist manufacturing industry and a new social power group (an “aristocracy,” he called them) of industrial manufacturers, whose power of control over capital threatens the freedom and pluralism and equality so essential for democracy. </p>
<p>(In Democracy in America, Tocqueville does not consider workers as a separate social class but rather as a menial fragment of <em>la class industrielle</em>. Here Tocqueville stood against Marx and sided with such contemporaries as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Henri_de_Rouvroy,_comte_de_Saint-Simon">Saint-Simon</a>, for whom workers and entrepreneurs comprised a single social class: <em>les industriels</em>. This partly explains why Tocqueville later reacted in contradictory ways to the events of 1848; as <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1985/jun/27/the-passions-of-tocqueville/">François Furet</a> and others have pointed out, he interpreted these events both as a continuation of the democratic revolution and, rather spitefully, as a “most terrible civil war” threatening the very basis of “property, family and civilisation.”) </p>
<p>This new “aristocracy” applied the division of labour principle to manufacturing, he noted. This dramatically increased the efficiency and volume of production, but at a high social cost.</p>
<p>The modern system of industrial manufacturing, he claimed, creates a manufacturing class, comprising a stratum of workers who are crowded into towns and cities where they are reduced to mind-numbing poverty, and a stratum of middle-class owners who love money and have no taste for the virtues of citizenship. </p>
<p>Tocqueville was among the first political writers to spot that a middle class gripped by selfish individualism and live-for-today materialism was prone to political promiscuity. </p>
<p>A class of so-called citizens “constantly circling for petty pleasures” could easily be persuaded to sacrifice their freedoms by embracing an “immense protective power” that treats its subjects as “perpetual children,” as a “flock of timid animals” in need of a shepherd. </p>
<p>Against Aristotle (“a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government”), Tocqueville argued that in fact the middle class has no automatic affinity with power-sharing democracy.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.smh.com.au/national/francis-fukuyama-sticks-to-his-guns-on-liberal-democracy-20150213-1377i8.html">Francis Fukuyama</a> has said recently that “the existence of a broad middle class” is “extremely helpful” in sustaining “liberal democracy.” </p>
<p>But what Tocqueville long ago pointed out is that under democratic conditions, especially when the poor grow uppity, the middle class might well display symptoms of what might be called political neurasthenia: lassitude, aching fatigue and general irritability about social and political disorder. </p>
<p>Guided by fear and greed and professional and family honour and respectability, they would be happy to be co-opted or kidnapped by state rulers, willing to be bought off with lavish services and cash payments and invisible benefits that brought them stable comforts. </p>
<p>With good reason, looking into the future, Tocqueville worried not only about the decline of public spirit within this middle class. </p>
<p>Yes, he was particularly exercised by its tendency to pursue wealth for the sake of wealth. That is why he worried his head about such bad “habits of the heart” as cupidity and selfishness, possessive individualism and narrow-minded cunning. </p>
<p>But his worries ran deeper than this. </p>
<p>Unlike Marx, Tocqueville predicted that both fractions of the new manufacturing class would press for government support of their interests;, for instance, through large-scale infrastructure projects, such as the provision of roads, railways, harbours and canals. </p>
<p>They would regard such projects necessary for the accumulation of wealth, the nurturing of equality and the maintenance of social order. When done in the name of the sovereign people, as Tocqueville expected it would be, government intervention and meddling in the affairs of civil society would choke the spirit of civil association. It might well lead, Tocqueville argued, to a new form of state servitude, the likes of which the world had never before seen. </p>
<p>The point is sketched in the fourth volume of Democracy in America, in What Type of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear? “I think the type of oppression threatening democratic peoples is unlike anything ever known,” he wrote. </p>
<p>Unlike past despotisms, which employed the coarse instruments of fetters and executioners, this new “democratic” despotism would nurture administrative power that is “absolute, differentiated, regular, provident and mild.” </p>
<p>Peacefully, bit by bit, by means of democratically formulated laws, government would morph into a new form of tutelary power dedicated to securing the welfare of its citizens – at the high price of clogging the arteries of civil society, thus robbing citizens of their collective power to act. </p>
<p>Tocqueville was sure that the fundamental problem of modern democracy was not the frantic and feverish mob, as critics of democracy from the time of Plato had previously supposed. </p>
<p>Modern despotism posed an entirely new and unfamiliar challenge. Feeding upon the fetish of private material consumption and the public apathy of citizens no longer much interested in politics, despotism is <em>a new type of popular domination</em>: a form of impersonal centralised power that masters the arts of voluntary servitude, a new type of state that is at once benevolent, mild and all-embracing, a disciplinary power that treats its citizens as subjects, wins their support and robs them of their wish to participate in government, or to pay attention to the common good. </p>
<p>The thesis was certainly bold, and original.</p>
<p>Tocqueville was the first modern political writer to see and to say that a new form of despotism born of the dysfunctions of modern representative democracy might well be our fate. </p>
<p>He taught us that in the age of democracy, forms of total power can only win legitimacy and govern effectively when they harness the trimmings and trappings of democracy – when they mirror and mimic actually existing democracies, in order better to go beyond them. </p>
<p>When we look back at the long crisis that gripped democracies a century after Tocqueville wrote, wasn’t the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia and Pol’s Cambodia marked by more than a few democratic features in this sense? </p>
<p>And when we look today at the <a href="http://www.klett-cotta.de/autor/John_Keane/59548">new despotisms of the Eurasian region</a> – Russia and China, for instance – shouldn’t we ask whether these regimes are simulacra of Western democracies now bogged down in various dysfunctions and pathologies? </p>
<p>Don’t they make us wonder where our own so-called democracies are heading? Might they be signals of the emerging fact, unless something gives, that despotism is once again fated to play centre stage of our political lives in the coming years of the 21st century? </p>
<p>Do we not have to thank Alexis de Tocqueville for warning us that they may well be the future of democracy? </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87223/original/image-20150702-11323-1ccv28m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87223/original/image-20150702-11323-1ccv28m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87223/original/image-20150702-11323-1ccv28m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87223/original/image-20150702-11323-1ccv28m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87223/original/image-20150702-11323-1ccv28m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87223/original/image-20150702-11323-1ccv28m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87223/original/image-20150702-11323-1ccv28m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87223/original/image-20150702-11323-1ccv28m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexis_de_tocqueville_cropped.jpg">Théodore Chassériau</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44174/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Keane receives funding from the Australian Research Council</span></em></p>To mark Independence Day, an Australian perspective on why - 180 years on - Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic political text is a must-read.John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.