Walt Whitman's Influence Of The American Renaissance

In the period, F. O. Matthiessen first called "American Renaissance" the American energy contributed to a kind of artistic and intellectual maturity. When European Romanticism entered United States it took an American shape; it “intersected with the frantic nationalism of the American 1830s and 1840s. It interacted with this time’s acute post-colonial anxiety over cultural dependencies that had survived political independence, and with the 1840s hunger for non-derivative forms of American expression” (Broadhead 14). This is the context that led to the emergence of the American Renaissance. It was a prolific period in American literary history; Over five remarkable years between 1850 and 1855 appeared Emerson's Representative Men (1850), Hawthorne's

Whitman approved of the influence when he wrote, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil” (qtd. in Reynolds, Walt Whitman: Lives and Legacies 11). In addition to Emerson, he was influenced by Italian opera, the King James Bible and the spatial vastness of astronomy. “But the crucial factor was Whitman’s sense of himself and the potentials of his craft: for him, poetry was a passionate gesture of identification with his native land” (Gray 109). After Emerson had read Leaves, he wrote to Whitman, “I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. . . . I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty” (qtd. in Whitman, The Portable Walt Whitman xv). Although Emerson had written comparable encouragements to other beginner poets, “by his own admission he had ‘looked in vain’ for the poet he described … and thus can be said to have genuinely hailed Whitman as the fulfillment of his hopes” (Krieg 395). To understand Whitman and his literary innovations, it is necessary to consider Whitman in this

Literary Democracy
In his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville devotes a part to “The Influence of Democracy on the Action of Intellect in The United States”, a quick glance at which would contribute significantly to one’s understanding of the idea of literary democracy in nineteenth-century America. His analysis is “guided by the fundamental contrast between aristocratic and democratic cultures” (Larson, “Song of Myself” 471). This part includes several chapters on democracy and literature, including “Literary Physiognomy of Democratic Centuries.”
In this chapter he explains that the problem of literature produced in America was that its writers followed the literary conventions of an aristocratic culture in their democratic country. In an aristocratic culture the literary career is restricted to ruling class or to those nearest to that. The power in this culture is hereditary; literary rules are the same. Writers follow those rules “that their ancestors imposed on themselves; their set of laws will be rigorous and traditional at the same time” (De Tocqueville 806). The members of that class meet only themselves and write only for themselves. Language used is different from the ones used by common man. Since the experience of that class is limited, the literature they produced is limited. Rules are traditional and rigorous. Therefore, everything is regular and prearranged. These are some of the deficiencies of literature produced in an aristocratic literature.