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By Root 856 0

whenever the government is lying or has betrayed the people, become a political force whether he intends to or not, as witness American artists during the 1930s or during the Vietnam war, Spanish artists during their civil war, South Korean poets in recent years, all Russian artists since the Revolution, Bertolt Brecht as Hitler rose to power, and so forth. In times like these the spirit of the polis must be removed from the hands of the politicians and survive in the resistant imagination. Then the artist finds he is describing a world that does not appear in the newspapers and someone has tapped his phone who never thought to call in times of peace.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the American spirit was largely absorbed in an expanding and self-confident mercantilism. The Industrial Revolution had arrived in the New World. And what was our poet’s relationship to this part of the native spirit? He was in love with it, or with a part of it at least. Whitman is a sort of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., for poets, whose Vistas “cheerfully include … a practical, stirring, worldly, money-making, even materialistic character …,” whose “theory includes riches, and the getting of riches …” What Whitman loved was the shimmer, the bustle, the electric excitement of the marketplace, not the practical aspects of making a living. He participated sensually in trade. In a letter to Peter Doyle he offers an emblematic description of his delight, sitting atop an omnibus in New York City:

If it is very pleasant … [I] ride a trip with some driver-friend on Broadway from 23 rd street to Bowling Green, three miles each way. You know it is a never-ending amusement & study & recreation for me to ride a couple of hours, of a pleasant afternoon, on a Broadway stage in this way. You see everything as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama—shops, & splendid buildings, & great windows, & on the broad sidewalks crowds of women, richly-dressed, continually passing, altogether different, superior in style & looks from any to be seen any where else—in fact a perfect stream of people, men too dressed in high style, & plenty of foreigners—& then in the streets the thick crowd of carriages, stages, carts, hotel & private coaches, & in fact all sorts of vehicles & many first-class teams, mile after mile, & the splendor of such a great street & so many tall, ornamental, noble buildings, many of them of white marble, & the gayety & motion on every side—You will not wonder how much attraction all this is, on a fine day, to a great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy world move by him, & exhibiting itself for his amusement, while he takes it easy & just looks on & observes.

In Democratic Vistas, Whitman ends a similar catalog of city delights saying that they “completely satisfy my senses of power, fulness, motion, &c, give me, through such senses and appetities, and through my esthetic conscience, a continued exaltation and absolute fulfilment.” This sensual participation in the liveliness of the market, along with Whitman’s credo— “all are invited”—means we find in him no reflexive antagonism toward the buyers and sellers. In life as in the poetry, he identifies as readily with the “nonchalant” farmer as with the Yankee “ready for trade.”

But, of course, Whitman stays seated on top of the omnibus, he doesn’t get down and take a job with the fruit vendor. The wealth accumulated by the men along Broadway is different from that of the man who writes, “I will carefully earn riches to be carried with me after the death of my body …,” or who says that “Charity and personal force are the only investments worth anything.” Whitman admits the traders as a part of his identity, but he is not a trader. They “are not the Me myself.”

So if by the mercantile spirit we mean the spirit of men who feel their lives are inside the merchandise itself, who must leap from high windows when the stock market falls, then Whitman lacks this spirit. He would still be riding the omnibus, observing their desperation. As for that mercantilism which becomes