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Speaking 'With': Rethinking Whitman's Sympathy in/outside His Culture

This essay invites readers to rethink the notion of Walt Whitman's sympathy via David Reynolds's cultural studies. Indebted to Reynold's rigorous recreation of the vanished literary culture shaped by canonical and popular writers of Whitman era, this essay compares the lines from "Song of Myself" with one of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's slave poems, "The Slave in the Dismal Swamp." At once locating Whitman in and out of the literary criticism and weaving D. H. Lawrence's discourse on Whitman and Deleuzian thinking of "feeling with" and the superiority of Anglo-American literature, this essay, in the tangled web of cultural discourse and literary theories, tries to envisage the greatness of Whitman's earlier poems rooted in the vernacular language and rhythm of his own time. In a sense, it is a project revising and complementing Reynolds' reading of Whitman and going beyond the limit of his reading on cultural geography. Questioning how Whitman digested his culture and kept distance from the genteel tradition of his time that Longfellow adopted without hesitation, I propose Whitman attain a different layer of sympathy in his slave poem, while Longfellow fell in the net of 'pity' in a condescending gesture. Whitman's sympathy as the form of feeling/speaking with makes readers re-experience 'the contact zone' with others, without the moral superiority represented in many sensational and moral writings in that era. Revisiting Lawrence's reading of Whitman and Deleuzian notion of feeling with, this essay concludes Whitman's poetic achievement is not literary isolationism of a lonely genius, but a radical practice of 'becoming' minority, transforming the ordinary space in his own culture into the act of doing in the Open Road.