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By Root 859 0

would do well to differentiate the term: adhesiveness is an eros power while most of what passes as politics is logos power. Law, authority, competition, hierarchy, and the exercise of royal or despotic will through the courts, the police, and the military—these are logos powers, and they are the skeletal structure of most political systems. The image of two women embracing is not found on any nation’s flag. Whitman envisioned drawing isolated individuals into a coherent and enduring body politic without resorting to the patriarchal articles of the social contract. In short, he would replace capitalist home economics with “the dear love of comrades.” His politics reveal an unspoken faith: that the realized and idiosyncratic self is erotic and that erotic life is essentially cohesive. He assumes that the citizen, like the poet, will emerge from the centripetal isolation, in which character forms, with an appetite for sympathetic contact and an urge both to create and to bestow.

In this last we come to the fusion of Whitman’s aesthetics and politics, the social life of the gifted self. Even more than the love of comrades, I think, the true cohesive force in Whitman’s democracy is art. In his political aesthetic, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, the artist absorbs not “objects” but “the central spirit and idiosyncrasies” of the people. And his responsive act is to create “a single image-making work for them.” It is this work, or better, the nation’s artistic wealth as a whole, which draws a people together. We could even say that the artist creates (or at least preserves) the “central spirit” of the people, for, as in the poetry, a spirit that has never been articulated cannot endure. As the poet Robert Bly says in a different context, “Praise to the first man who wrote down this joy clearly, for we cannot remain in love with what we cannot name …” Nor can we nurture or take sustenance from a spirit that remains unspoken. In Whitman’s democracy the native author creates an “embryo or skeleton” of the native spirit. The artist absorbs a thing that is alive, of course, but its life is not assured until its name has been given. Literature does not simply absorb a spirit, says Whitman, it “breed[s] a spirit.”

Whitman insisted that a spirit dwelled in the American people which was different from the one articulated by romantic novels from the Continent or by native authors, such as Longfellow. And he believed the spirit would soon be lost if it could not be realized in art. Democratic Vistas calls for American authors to create a domestic literature by which to ensure the survival of democracy. Our art should accrue a national image, he says, “an aggregate of heroes, characters, exploits, sufferings, prosperity or misfortune, glory or disgrace, common to all, typical to all.” Literature forms the “osseous structure” that fuses the nation together so that its spirit may survive trauma. The urgency of Whitman’s essay grew out of his own disappointment with democracy in action in 1870. How, without a native literature, was the Union to survive the corruptions that followed the Civil War? “The lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me.” Art is a political force for Whitman, but for a third time we must say that we are not speaking of politics in the conventional sense.

Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power.* Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective. It has no logos power, but the law and the legislatures will say they thought it up when it comes to term. In an early letter Whitman writes that “under and behind the bosh of the regular politicians, there burns … the divine fire which …, during all ages, has only wanted a chance to leap forth and confound the calculations of tyrants, hunkers, and all their tribe.” The work of the political artist creates a body for this fire. So long as the artist speaks the truth, he will,