The Pragmatic Whitman: Reimagining American Democracy

by Mack, Stephen John

• ISBN13: 9780877458227
• ISBN10: 0877458227
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Iowa Pr

Author Biography

Stephen Mack currently teaches advanced writing at the University of Southern California.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Abbreviations	xiii
Introduction: The Evolution of Whitman's Democratic Vision	xv
PART I The Metaphysics of Democracy: Leaves of Grass, 1855 and 1856	1	(74)
``My Voice Goes after What My Eyes Cannot Reach'': Pragmatic Language and the Making of a Democratic Mythology	3	(20)
``What Is Less or More Than a Touch?'': Sensory Experience and the Democratic Self	23	(15)
``The Simple, Compact Well-Join'd Scheme'': Whitman's Democratic Cosmos	38	(22)
``Not Chaos or Death . . . . It Is Form and Union and Plan'': Laissez-faire and the Problem of Agency	60	(15)
PART II Crises and ReVisions: ``Sea-Drift,'' ``Calamus,'' Drum-Taps, and Sequel to Drum-Taps, 1859-1867	75	(58)
``The Most Perfect Pilot'': The Problem of Desire and the Struggle for Poetic Agency	77	(23)
``To Learn from the Crises of Anguish'': Tragedy, History, and the Meaning of Democratic Mourning	100	(33)
PART III Prophet of Democracy: Democratic Vistas, 1871	133	(27)
``The Divine Literatus Comes'': Religion and Poetry in the Cultivation of Democratic Selfhood	135	(25)
Conclusion: Toward an Organic Democracy	160	(7)
Notes	167	(8)
Bibliography	175	(4)
Index	179