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Professor Clarke
ENGL 463
3 February 2022

Walt Whitman and The Flaw of Impartiality

Walt Whitman is considered by many to be one of the most venerated and important poets in the English language— in fact, he is often referred to as the 'bard of democracy' (or the 'poet of democracy'). His apparently progressive values are highly praised: the queerness of many of his works, his willingness to treat slaves with the humanity that they had been denied, and the fact that he gives equal treatment and respect to all things throughout his body of work. A main point of praise for his poetry, in fact, revolves around this idea that he treats everyone and everything with equal respect, thus demonstrating an impartial worldview that allows him to, in essence, 'see' and experience both sides of any given issue. That being said, an impartial worldview only goes so far; and there are simply issues for which 'both-sidesing' is just as bad as siding with the "bad" side. Whitman's poems are important to the field of English and a great source of study, but to portray him in a solely positive light is to ignore many facets of his beliefs and how they have made themselves apparent in his works, unused or otherwise. In an earlier draft of "Song of Myself", a poem in his seminal work Leaves of Grass, Whitman's refusal to take a firm ethical stance on the matter of slavery is, ultimately, damning but reflective of his beliefs— which were, throughout his lifetime, everchanging, often self-contradictory, and often based in flawed or strange reasoning. For this reason, despite Whitman's attempts at treating everything with the same amount of absolute equality, he ultimately fails; both because unequal social hierarchy inherently cannot be reconciled with the equal, democratic treatment of all since by its very nature a hierarchical system is unequal, and for the mere fact that his own ingrained beliefs prevent him from actually seeing and treating the world as equally as he claims.

Whitman's self-contradictory worldviews are nowhere more evident than in his views on slavery itself and, more generally, the concept of racism that so pervaded his time. Whitman's great-grandfather owned slaves, and himself did not particularly approve of the "ten percent of Brooklyn residents" with African heritage. At the same time, Whitman thought slavery to be abominable; the human sympathy he held for the working class "naturally extended to those in servitude" and in fact he "often wrote in the voice of the oppressed" (PBS). Whitman believed in a social hierarchy that privileged white people and disadvantaged Black people; while he hated slavery, he also did little to actually act against it, and throughout various works of his outside of his seminal Leaves of Grass one can find blatant evidence that only serves to reinforce this social hierarchy. He thought abolitionists were extremists chasing a fantasy; to him, they were involved in an "effort to destroy our Constitution--the work of the wisest and purest statesmen" (Reynolds 118), a statement emblematic of his views on race: the 'purest' statesmen were, of course, white. They were "few and foolish red-hot fanatics" (119), people whose ideas were as "as impracticable as [they were] wild." (119). His vocal dislike of "both forms of disunion, abolitionism and nullification" (119) is, in practice, representative of the equal stance he so often took in his poetry. One might then argue that his resistance to both sides is just as praiseworthy as the sentiment he expresses in his poetry: he treats both sides with an equal amount of scrutiny, not letting his biases get the best of him. However, biases towards one side are not always inherently bad, especially when those biases are towards the abolition of an abusive institution built upon the suffering of one's fellow man; equality of any kind is not possible where one side is clearly wrong and the other right. When Whitman did eventually change his mind on abolitionism, it was not because of the plight of the 'slaves' against the 'masters', or anything of the sort, but rather because the suffering of the soldiers on both sides of the Union-Confederate conflict so moved him to action.

Knowing this historical context, then, puts the cut passage from Leaves of Grass into perspective, and a stark one at that. Whitman boldly proclaims himself to be "the poet of slaves, and of the masters of slaves" (Whitman, line 1), and he states that he goes "with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters" (line 4). In doing so, he, but he also indicates his complicity in the institution of slavery; he offers no indication of changing the slaves' social status, or that it will ever change. Art need not necessarily be moral itself, obviously, but when one introduces the political element to one's work through the lens of the self, as Whitman does throughout "Song of Myself" (a work basically dedicated to the idea of the self and personalism), it is a fairly evident expression of one's political beliefs. In his poem "To A President", for example, Whitman speaks as himself: "[...] the politics of Nature you / have not learn'd the great amplitude, rectitude, impartiality" (lines 2-3). Defenders of Whitman's impartial stance might cite this as an example of his willingness to transcend the divisions that separate us from one another, by stating that it is baseline for humans to act with the same impartiality that Whitman does and people simply choose not to, thus complicating the world. However, this more clearly exemplifies his refusal to act as a moral agent and thus act above the rule of nature and with humanity, as only humans can. Whitman decidedly rejects the idea that humans are capable of transcending their base nature through choice and communicates instead the idea that they must instead only act according to set rules, put in place for them by the universe. For Whitman, these fundamental laws of nature are more important to abide by than the moral choice to rise above them.

It is often said that 'silence is complicity'. To be silent in the face of oppression is to side with the oppressors, as to be silent is to stand aside and willingly allow abuse and cruelty to continue. In refusing to take an ethical stance, particularly in his cut passage, Whitman indicates his complicity in the institution of slavery and in both general inequality and the inherent injustices of social hierarchies in general, even without the knowledge on his background and genuine political beliefs. He is vocal in all the wrong ways and tellingly silent where he could be vocal in the right ones. His poem "I Sit And Look Out", also from Leaves of Grass, is emblematic of this. Whitman writes: "all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon, / See, hear, and am silent." (lines 17-18), inevitably speaking the quiet part out loud. Even in the face of great suffering, he remains quiet, refusing to pass any sort of moral judgement or get involved, perhaps unintentionally ironic in retrospect. Despite looking out upon "all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame" (lines 1-2) the narrator, and thus Whitman, remains adamantly blasé. Whitman's impartiality and the idea of his supposed "equal treatment of all" is flawed and blatantly hypocritical: his claim to live without bias, to "stand between the masters and the slaves" and "[enter] into both" (lines 5-6), is intrinsically made impossible by the existence of social hierarchies that fundamentally disadvantage one party while elevating the other. One cannot be both master and slave. Even the real-life examples of his refusal to pick a side reinforce this: the aforementioned way he saw both abolitionists and those upholding slavery as 'equally' bad is inherently wrong, as the two are not comparable. To stand with both masters and slaves is to stand in the middle of an unbalanced dichotomy, one where oppression is winning, and not lend one's weight, both actively and morally, to the losing, oppressed side.

In the end, Whitman does not succeed in reconciling the equal and democratic treatment of all with the presence of social hierarchies. His own personal political beliefs, and the way they themselves changed over his life (as beliefs are prone to do) undermine any sort of impartial message that he attempted to put out through his poetry. No matter his claims to empathize with enslaved peoples, his actual beliefs on race and his unwillingness to actually speak out for them and instead to 'walk the line' between the oppressors and the oppressed means Whitman ends up siding with the oppressors, unintentionally or not. The line does not exist the way Whitman thinks it does; the issue of slavery, really, is one of the few where a true binary exists. One either wants Black people to be treated as humans, or they do not. There is no true middle ground between wanting what is best for slavers and slaves— to treat them both 'equally', to "[enter] into both, so that both shall understand [him] alike" (line 6); essentially, to want what is 'best for both'; is only another way to want the best for slavers: the oppressors.

Works Cited

“Revising Himself: Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass Notebook with Trial Lines for Leaves of Grass.” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/whitman/0006-trans.html.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

“Whitman and Race.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/whitman-and-race/.

Whitman, Walt. “I Sit And Look Out.” I SIT AND LOOK OUT. (Leaves of Grass (1891–1892)) - The Walt Whitman Archive, https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/129.

Whitman, Walt. “To a President.” TO A PRESIDENT. (Leaves of Grass (1891–1892)) - The Walt Whitman Archive, https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/128.