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Poetry in America: Representing Equality Through Accounts of Poetry in Alexis De Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Stuart Mill

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Poetry in America: Representing Equality Through Accounts of Poetry in Alexis De Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Stuart Mill Poetry in America: Representing Equality Through Accounts of Poetry in Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Stuart Mill by Joshua M. Shipper A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Political Science) in the University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Elizabeth R. Wingrove, Chair Associate Professor Mika T. LaVaque-Manty Associate Professor Robert W. Mickey Professor Yopie H. Prins Joshua M. Shipper [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5700-119X © Joshua M. Shipper 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe my dissertation committee the deepest of thanks for their support and attention over the course of this project. Thank you first to Mika LaVaque-Manty, for helping me to define the project’s initial parameters and for insisting that any inquiry into the emergence of the designation “ordinary” in nineteenth-century America had also to account for a crisis in the collective practices of the extraordinary and excellent — a move which opened my project to the genre of poetry. I also owe deep appreciation to Rob Mickey for serving as my first instructor of literature and politics in the American context — and for asserting the right and capacity of political scientists to make literature a terrain for inquiry. Rob’s mentorship from my first year on has defined how I understand political theory’s relationship to political contest. Thank you also to Yopie Prins for helping me to see the project to its completion as well as for serving as a scholar whose interventions into the field of the history and theory of poetry shaped my approach long before I had the chance to work with her. My deepest gratitude is owed to Elizabeth Wingrove who influenced this project at the level of its practice and politics. Accompanying me on explorations of the politics of voice and indirect address — which included detours to much bad poetry — she shaped my vision of the stakes for meaning-making practices we privilege and exclude. I learned what writing can do and !ii what scholarship aspires to be; in the process I credit Liz with quite literally helping me “find” a voice in a project concerned with its elusive enactment in communication. Finally, thank you to Lisa Disch for a late reading of the project to help me finalize its claims and structure; and to George Shulman for reflecting on early drafts of worker poems and Tocqueville’s persistent return to poetry among other literary forms. I owe thanks to colleagues and peers too numerous to name and whose success in the field inspired me to progress. Thank you to my initial cohort in the Political Theory program — Bonnie Washick, Damien Picariello, and Erin Baribeau — whose early attention in course work and workshops helped form my early sense of the field. I owe a special thanks to fellow theorist Kathleen Tipler whose mentorship over many years saw me through the most challenging moments of the degree. I also owe thanks to scholars across Rackham including Pascal Massinon in History, Katie Lennard and Rachel Miller in American Culture, Samantha Grabowska in Architecture, and many more friends whose support I cannot capture here. I owe a special thanks to the members of the Michigan Political Theory Workshop, to Louis Cicciarelli and participants in the Dissertation Writing Institute, to Anne Gere and the Sweetland Fellows Seminar, and to the Poetry and Poetics Workshop. Thank you to the Alfred Meyer Family Research Grant, the Sangunett Award, and to the Department of Political Science and Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies for supporting my project. Finally, thank you to my parents for their continued support and to J. Carlisle Larsen who I met just as this project was beginning and to whom it is in retrospect dedicated. !iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………..……..……………………………………………………….ii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………v INTRODUCTION: Poetry in America: Representing the Figure of the Poet in Nineteenth-Century Democratic Theory, 1833-1856………………………….………….……1 CHAPTER I. Equality Adorned: Poetry and the Idioms of Egalitarian Norms in Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy In America…………….………………..……………..…38 CHAPTER II. The Right to Poetry: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Poet” and the Work of Equality…………..………….…..…68 CHAPTER III. Poetic Address and the Representation of Authentic Expression in John Stuart Mill’s “What Is Poetry?” (1833) and “Two Kinds of Poetry” (1833)…..….….92 CONCLUSION: The Idioms of Poetic Citizenship: Representing Literature as Political Practice in Nineteenth-Century America……………………………………….119 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………… …………147 !iv ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the relationship between political and literary practices. Highlighting the connection between American literature and democratic theory that appears in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Stuart Mill, my project considers how the fate of poetry in the new world joins poetical theory to aesthetic practice, and both to the practices of citizenship. For all three nineteenth-century theorists (and critics) of democracy, the representation of American citizens as readers and writers of poetry becomes a productive site for the dramatization of political practices and likewise, for navigating familiar tensions among democracy, egalitarian norms, and human flourishing. In developing this analysis I show how their respective accounts of poetry incorporate the idioms of their political projects, thus extending the promises and pitfalls of democratic equality to literature. I suggest that in so doing, they present the American democratic “experiment” as in part a literary project. Chapter One considers Tocqueville’s career-long appeals to poetry as part and parcel of his effort to diagnose and remediate the problematic relationship between private individuals and a tutelary state. Poetry, I argue, offers a version of his intermediary bodies writ literary. Chapter Two explores Emerson’s account of poetry as a means of cultivating and enacting admiration for the great while avoiding the worshipful, thus subordinate, postures such admiration risks. By capturing the beauty of ordinary and meager subjects, poetry becomes for Emerson a project of !v augmenting the aesthetic value of the lives of democratic citizens. Chapter Three examines Mill’s essays on poetry, which he presents as a mode of communication enabling authentic expression without the constraints imposed by democratic conditions. In incorporating the idioms of intimate exchange, Mill’s idealized notion of poetic utterance suggests that citizen- interlocutors might overcome the pernicious effects of democratic publicity through indirect address. This project expands on recent work concerning the diversity of writing genres pertinent to democratic theory, by recovering literary practices and relations as key elements in the political thought of Tocqueville, Emerson, and Mill. I argue that poetry orients each thinker to the relationship between democratic equality and human flourishing: overlooking how poetry articulates and nurtures this relationship, I suggest, occludes the role of literary writing in both contributing new visions of democratic equality and in giving those new visions worldly form. keywords: democracy; literature; American political thought; Alexis de Tocqueville; Ralph Waldo Emerson; John Stuart Mill; historical poetics !vi INTRODUCTION Poetry in America: Representing the Figure of the Poet in Nineteenth-Century Democratic Theory, 1833-1856 In the opening pages of Democracy in America (1835), Alexis Tocqueville offers a list of talents that democracy makes available to “the people” including “poetry, eloquence and memory, the grace and wit, [and] the glow of imagination.”1 These are “placed within the reach of the people” under democracy yet it will also turn out that “nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.”2 Within several years of that work’s publication another democratic thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would draw on the relationship between poetry and democracy to reach similar conclusions about the possibility of poetry in America. While for Emerson “the great, the remote, the romantic” would give way to a poetry of common subjects, he expresses concerns over whether Americans were up to the task: “the geography is sublime,” he writes, “but the men are not.”3 Finally, John Stuart Mill would propose the use of a poetic mode of solitary address to 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by Henry Reeve (New York: Bantam, 2002 [1835, 1840]), p. 5. 2 Ibid., p. 591. 3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Larzer Ziff, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 1982 [1837]), pp. 101-102; Emerson, Journal Entry, in William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth, et al, eds., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960-1972), p. 284. !1 enhance the possibilities for authentic expression within mass democracy. But the difficult means of maintaining a form of address he defined as poetic amidst the pressures of conformity and imitation made poetry an unlikely art form in democracy.4 The possibility of poetry in America appears across three major accounts of American democracy. Used as a lens into the literary lives of democratic subjects, poetry operates in various ways within each account: as a trope
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