Dressing Uncivil Neighbor(hood)s. Walt Whitman's Adhesive Democracy in “Calamus” and “Drum-Taps”

Abstract

This article analyzes 19th-century US poet Walt Whitman’s vindication of “adhesiveness” as imperative to the formation of a social democracy which might heal the neighborly hatreds of a divided United States and bind the nation together at a time of violent fragmentation and Civil War. The article examines Whitman’s location of the possibility of politics and democracy at the interpersonal level, and connects the poet’s political project in his 1860 “Calamus” with that in the 1865 “Drum-Taps”, studying how Whitman’s belief in the uniting capacity of love between men remained constant even as he was witnessing the tragic consequences of a four-year Civil War which would widen even more the irreconcilable gulfs between different Americans.