ABSTRACT
Jane Bennett argues that political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc human and non-human forces. Vibrant matter contests the distinction between humans and other matter. Bennett’s materiality doggedly resists anthropomorphism. Walt Whitman is for Bennett the great poet of American democracy, a writer not only promoting, but inscribing in his performative writing, a philosophical, literary and poetic model of democracy. Like the presence of Whitman writing, there was a presence of his life, amongst other highly politicised zones of democratic contestation. Bennett’s study of Whitman’s constructed persona develops understandings of the relationships one can have with poetry and politics.
