Walt Whit MAN and our country

“I am large, I contain multitudes.” When Walt Whitman wrote these words in Leaves of Grass, he wasn’t just describing himself. He was offering a vision of America: a country big enough, generous enough, brave enough to hold its contradictions without tearing apart. A place where the farmer and the banker, the enslaved and the free, the immigrant and the native-born could all find their voices carried in one democratic song.

But America has always had a hard time living up to that vision. Even in Whitman’s century, the “multitudes” were not equally welcomed. His poetry was written as the nation bled itself in Civil War — over the very question of who counted as fully human, fully American. And though he could imagine a union of voices, women had no vote, Indigenous peoples were being erased, and Black freedom was still contested even after emancipation.

Now, in our own political moment, the cracks in Whitman’s dream have split wide again. Politicians speak constantly of “the people,” but the phrase has become a weapon rather than a promise. Each side claims to represent the “real America,” as though there were only one. Immigration, race, religion, wealth, even basic truth — all are fault lines over which “the people” are divided and redefined.
This is why Whitman feels both urgent and unsettling today. His Leaves of Grass is not a finished anthem but an unfinished argument. He challenges us to ask whether democracy is still capable of holding “multitudes,” or whether it collapses when voices clash too loudly. Can America live up to Whitman’s radical faith that unity is not sameness, but the courage to coexist with irreconcilable differences?

The danger now is not simply political polarization. The danger is forgetting that Whitman’s “we” was never meant to be small. It was meant to stretch, to strain, to include. When “the people” becomes a slogan of exclusion, we betray the very experiment Whitman believed in.

So the question remains: who is “the people” anyway? The answer is unfinished — just like Whitman’s America. But maybe his challenge is this: the moment we stop struggling to contain multitudes, we cease to be a democracy at all.

🦉