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Jeffersonian Whitman: the Impact of Jefferson On 201 THE BEAUTY OF MEDUSA – PARADOXES OF CULTURE JEFFERSONIAN WHITMAN: THE IMPACT OF JEFFERSON ON WHITMAN KIYOTAKA SUEYOSHI University of Szeged Abstract: As regards the relation between Whitman and U.S. presidency, the critical studies center on the relation between Whitman and Lincoln. The process of Whitman’s commitment to the Democratic Party and his alienation from it, and of becoming the self-anointed inheritor of Jeffersonian republicanism plays a key role in the formation of political and poetical Whitman. Faced with the disunion of the U.S., Whitman had recourse to the ideal of the Founding Fathers. Whitman’s poetry is the mediation between Jeffersonian republicanism and Whitman’s America, and between politics and poetics. Keywords: Democratic Party, republicanism, the Declaration of Independence, Wilmot proviso 1. Introduction In a conversation with Horace Traubel, who was with Whitman in Camden, Whitman agreed that Jefferson is “among the greatest of the great,” adding, “Yes, greatest of the great: that names him: it belongs to him: he is entitled to it” (Traubel 1961: 229). Yet, Whitman, as a poet, demurred: the worship of a great hero is the typical characteristic of the poetry of the Old World. In the deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman (1891-2: 391) refers to Jefferson only once: in Election Day, November, 1884, he said, “These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships, / Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.” In this way, Jefferson’s influence on poems of Whitman, however large it may be, is not in the forefront, but in the background. Whitman’s references to Jefferson were made in his prose, especially before 1855, when Whitman had not fully established his own voice. As regards the relation between Whitman and the U.S. presidents, research has been done almost exclusively on the relation between Whitman and Lincoln, who were coeval and to whom Whitman, in Leaves of Glass, dedicated a chapter entitled Memories of President Lincoln. For instance, Shira Wolosky (2007: 373), in Walt Whitman: the office of the poet, remarked “The President Whitman has been most closely associated with is Lincoln.” Thus the link between Jefferson’s ideas about government and Whitman’s ideas about poetry remains unexplored. Jefferson is a politician and Whitman a poet, but both share the same theoretical background – faith in ordinary people – from which they developed their ideas. In this essay, I would like to show how influential Jefferson was on Whitman and put Jefferson’s influence into perspective. 2. The interactive system of Whitman’s poetry and of Jefferson’s politics In the beginning, both Jefferson and Whitman spoke outside of an institutional framework; the spirit of Whitman, an obscure New Yorker, in his B.A.S. vol. XXVII, 2021 202 assumption of the role of national bard, is like that of Jefferson, an unknown Virginian at the time, in seeking to persuade George III to change his attitude towards the American colonies in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. (Jefferson 1977: 1-21). Also we can draw a parallel between the situation of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Alien and Sedition Acts in that, by both laws, individual freedom was trampled on. Referring to the situation before what is known as the Revolution of 1800, when Jefferson defeated John Adams in the elections, Whitman (1920a: 8), calling Jefferson “the Columbus of our political faith”, said that, although “Leading Republicans were at that time taunted and hooted at in the streets” (ibid.), they gained the final victory: We stand here the inheritors of their principles and opposed to the same foe the foe of equal rights. Democracy must conquer again as it did then and more certainly than it did then. We think so from two simple facts. One is that the great body of workingmen are more powerful and more enlightened now than they were in those days. The other is, that there is a mighty and restless energy throughout the length and breadth of this nation, for going onward to the very verge with our experiment of popular freedom. (Whitman 1920a: 8-9) Though this was written in 1847, before the (new) Fugitive Slave Law, Whitman’s passion for popular freedom, inherited from Jefferson, unmistakably prodded him into a similar resistance action of self-publishing Leaves of Grass. It can be added that he thought that his resistance action was supported by his belief in the ‘more enlightened’ people. About the principles of his poems, Whitman, in his own criticism of Leaves of Grass (1855), said: The style of these poems, therefore, is simply their own style, new-born and red. Nature may have given the hint to the author of the Leaves of Grass, but there exists no book or fragment of a book, which can have given the hint to them. (1855b) This mindset is the mirror of that of Founding Fathers; when they formulated their ideas, Jefferson stated that We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts. (1977: 578) Needless to say, it is better to take both remarks with a grain of salt, but the same essence runs through them: the emphasis on the independence from the past. Yet, most importantly, Jefferson’s idea about the relationship between the form of government and people corresponds to Whitman’s about the form and the content of his poems. For Jefferson, “Government had to be tailored to fit the character of a people rather than any universal theory of man” (Steele 2012: 107). Whitman, also influenced by Emerson, wrote poems reflecting the idea that thought should be placed above form. In other words, just as the relationship between Jefferson’s people and government is interactive, the relationship between Whitman’s content and form is also reciprocal; the primacy of people over government in Jefferson’s political philosophy corresponds to the primacy of content over form in Whitman’s poetry. 203 THE BEAUTY OF MEDUSA – PARADOXES OF CULTURE About their view of the ordinary people, there also are intimate resemblances. Most famously, Whitman, in his preface to Leaves of Grass (1855), remarked: Other states indicate themselves in their deputies… but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors… but always most in the common people. (1855a: 4) Jefferson, who was proud of the American character and spirit and compared them with those of the Europeans, said: In science, the mass of the people is two centuries behind ours; their literati, half a dozen years before us. (1977: 391, emphasis mine) Here, two comparisons are made. As regards the “literati,” those of Europe are “half a dozen years” ahead of those in America, but “the mass of the people” existing in Europe is “two centuries behind” that existing in America.” Furthermore, interestingly, in his manuscript entitled The English Masses, Whitman points out that In regard to intelligence, education, knowledge, the masses of the people, in comparison with the masses of the U.S. are at least two hundred years behind us. (1984b: 391, emphasis mine) Coincidence? Probably not. Some commentators quote this saying of Whitman’s, but none refer to Jefferson’s influence. This instance shows both that Whitman had a firm grasp of Jefferson’s writing and that its impact on Whitman was insufficiently recognized. I shall move on to the topic of putting the ordinary people at the center in literature. Before Whitman, however laudable people may have been, there was a conventional cultural barrier against the idea. It is one thing to say that common people are praiseworthy; it is quite another to make them the subject matter of literature. For example, Tocqueville, prominent in his understanding of American society at the time, viewed them as an unpoetical subject, saying “In democratic communities, where men are all insignificant and very much alike, […] The poets of democratic ages can never, therefore, take any man in particular as the subject of a piece” (1835, 1840: 551); instead of such men, “the nation itself invites the exercise of his (poet’s) powers.” (idem: 552) However, both America as a whole and individual people can become the subject matter of poetry. Here likeness, seen by Tocqueville as a fixed state, can also be seen as a process or experience, namely interchangeability between one state and another. Somkin (1967: 106) points out that “Eli Whitney’s interchangeability of parts extended equally to the plantation and the legislature. Fatal as it might be to the genius of art, it was the genuine reflection of a republic that was becoming a democracy.” Unlike that of the Old World, the social structure in America at the time was not rigid, based on class, birth, and so on. It had a social fluidity, and this is what democracy is all about. By the old criterion, ordinary people might not appear to be a subject challenging enough to hone poets’ creativity, but by the criterion of the New World this was possible. Whitman said, in his defense of Leaves of Grass, that B.A.S. vol. XXVII, 2021 204 We have had man indoors and under artificial relations – man in war, in love (both the natural, universal elements of human lives) – man in courts, bowers, castles, parlors […] but never before have we had man in the open air, his attitude adjusted to the seasons and as one might describe it, adjusted to the sun by day and the stars by night.
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