Reassessing Whitman's Hegelian Affinities

From the 1920s until the 1960s, as millie D. Jensen demonstrates in her 1964 essay, "Whitman and Hegel: The Curious Triplicate Process," the quiet controversy about when Whitman first became aware of the philosopher spurred some advances into the question before its appeal seemed to disappear for a time.1 The facts are suggestive but do not allow a precise answer. Two anthologies which came into print around the same time as the poem that would eventually be known as "song of myself," frederic H. Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany (1847) and Joseph gostick's German Literature (1854), were likely the main sources of Whitman's exposure to the thought of Hegel before 1879, but it is unclear when he read them. aside from his references to the philosopher in Democratic Vistas, there is nothing to suggest that during this period he sought more knowledge about him from the groups of american devotees which began to congregate in the second half of the century. among Whitman's notes a short series of entries titled "The sunday evening lectures" discusses Hegel and german-language philosophy, and, though it is generally agreed that these notes were written some time in the late 1860s, there is no firm evidence for a date. it is clear, however, that Whitman's engagement with Hegelian thought has two phases, the first coming between 1868 and 1871 when he was at work on Democratic Vistas and the second ten years later, when he met in st. louis with the Hegelian William Torrey Harris.In addition to determining what Whitman learned about Hegel and when, interpreting their relation also often involves recognizing thatWhit- man from the outset wanted to use Hegel to frame and project the legacy of a poetics which was already a decade old. in this respect even Whit- man's own account of his Hegelianism in these years ought to be read as a proleptic rather than retrospective description, since he was turning to Hegel not for an explanation of the power of his poetry's emergence but to explain its role in the social life and future of america. With the claim that "only Hegel is fit for america," Whitman pretty clearly asks the philosopher to stand in for himself when his poetics are pressed to a new level of involvement with politics.2This connection betweenWhitman and hegel-politically focused- i take to be the widely accepted one at the time of this writing. as Kath- ryne V. Lindberg pointed out in her powerful 1991 critique, "Whitman's 'Convertible Terms,'" the range of problems emerging from Whitman's pretense to a widely representative selfhood have only come under scru- tiny since theory has developed terms with which to attack the hegelian affinities Whitman claimed. Lindberg puts it most concisely this way:With successive self-presentations, from the representative "i" to a "me/myself " that encloses all the questions and answers of the philosophers and priests of the past, the Whitmanesque self loses its historical specificity in order to become transcendent or, like the hegelian world historical spirit, translatable-yet Whitman also insists on being "untranslatable." Just so, mergers of chauvinism and egotism into what Quentin ander- son has termed the "imperial self " [1971] were already apparent in the 1855 preface.3For the lines of contemporary theory most concerned to articulate the importance of differences, Whitman's problematic self-conception can be traced to 1855 but only dismantled once he begins to make explicitly political and philosophical claims-as, in Lindberg's view, when he brings together in Democratic Vistas his ideal of the highest poetry as speaking for all with a rough notion of the dialectic in order to claim the impor- tance of hegel for recognizing how americans must improve on their undemocratic inheritance of english literature. so Lindberg's critique of Whitman's hegelianism culminates in a deconstruction of the poem which she understands his later prose to explicate:The typical personality of Whitman's poetic and critical corpus is wide, amorphous, if not aleatory. …