Published by Koharu on 10 Nov 2009 at 10:36 am
The Other Side of Whitman (Nov. 10 Post)
The introduction to ‘Franklin Evans’ or ‘The Inebriate’ revealed a side of Whitman that many texts decline to show. Walt Whitman is best known as the people’s poet – a man who dedicated his life to writing poetry with the potential to unite an entire nation. He accepted African Americans as fellow men in a time when the rest of society considered them sub-human. Whitman accepted everyone…except Catholics and Irish Immigrants. In Whitman’s own words, the immigrants were:
Bands of filthy wretches whose very touch was offensive to a decent man; drunken loafers; scoundrels whom the police and criminal courts would be ashamed to receive in their walls.
He went on to call them “sly, false, deceitful villains” and true to his nativist beliefs called on his fellow Americans to defend the country against an “unterrified democracy” ruled by “Irish rabble”.
Whitman seems to have despised Catholics, calling them “a gang of false and villainous priests, whose despicable souls never generate any aspiration beyond their own narrow and horrible and beastly superstition”. He never passed up a chance to criticize them, a far cry from the accepting poet I’ve come to know over the semester, who was never this blatantly insensitive and insulting even when addressing people with views that opposed his. Whitman was and is indeed the people’s poet, so long as you’re not Catholic, Irish or an immigrant.
s-words on 10 Nov 2009 at 5:44 pm #
Or African American, really. My classmates and I have long focused on the limits of Whitman’s assumed inclusivity, with particular reference to several denigrating statements Whitman made about African Americans before, during, and after the war that would determine their political and cultural fates. Roy Morris, Jr.’s “The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War” reveals that Whitman published an editorial containing the following highly racialized quote in the May 1858 Brooklyn Daily Times:
‘Who believes that Whites and Blacks can ever amalgamate in America? Or who wishes it to happen? Nature has set an impassable seal against it. Besides, is not America for the Whites? And is it not better so?’ (80)
(The passage that follows in Morris’ book addresses Whitman’s late-life interviews with Horace Traubel, in which the poet reacts to the so-called “n****r question.”)
Of course, this only extends your chief argument, that Whitman could truly serve as the “people’s poet” for an ever slimmer swathe of the American public. Interesting that, without your observations on Whitman’s views of Irish immigrants, I concluded in my blog for Oct. 20 that “Whitman’s ostensibly wide-open call for American camaraderie” may only have been meant for a “white” (as opposed to a white-and-black) audience. Your blog reminds me of how limited the concepts of “whiteness,” “Americanness,” etc. would have been to a nineteenth-century “native” Caucasian American, even one who outwardly subscribed Whitman’s purported brand of openness.
For more on this subject, see the Mary Washington course’s blogs for Oct. 20. I wasn’t the only one so unsettled by this realization.