ABSTRACT
Despite Walt Whitman's reputation as a socialist hero in some parts of the world, there is in American literary criticism a significant tradition that queries the integrity and coherence of his egalitarian assertions. One of the poet's recent biographers, Justin Kaplan, has suggested that Horace Traubel was largely responsible for the myth of Whitman the socialist; 1 but even if we spare him this anachronism, Whitman is constantly proclaiming or 'promulging' himself as the great democrat, a claim that has occasioned a good deal of disaffected scrutiny of the political logic of his writings. D. H. Lawrence appreciated the originality and force of Whitman's determination to plant the soul in the body, thereby challenging a common dualism of Christian doctrine; but he also felt that the American poet's attitude to other people and other forms of life was at root unhealthy. It was not true 'sympathy' but rather an insistence upon being one with everything, a 'merging' and self-sacrifice. 2 For Lawrence, this compulsion negated or avoided the fruitful recognition of difference, of the otherness of others. Hence Whitman supplanted the love of woman (difference) by the comradely appreciation of men (sameness), and eventually subsumed the love of everything into an extended hymn to death, the true egalitarian. Whitman failed to realize that forms of life, whether human or animal, 'have the instinct of turning right away from some matter, and of blissfully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter', (p. 172).
