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An ailing democracy needs the good medicine of poetry

Chard deNiord Special to The Journal
Chard deNiord

Chard deNiord is this month's guest writer for my column space. By invoking Walt Whitman, deNiord conjures one of America's most important poets, and one of its most ardent defenders of democracy.

Both in poetry and in life, Whitman celebrated the importance of the individual and the spirit of the collective. He was perhaps the first to venerate lofty ideals and ordinary people within the same lines and thus became a poetic pioneer for equality.

— Tina Cane, poet laureate of Rhode Island, tinacane.ink

In the preface to the 1855 edition of his collection "Leaves of Grass," the oracular poet of American democracy, Walt Whitman, celebrated "the United States themselves … as essentially the greatest poem" and its "common people" its "genius."

Sixteen years later in 1871, during the Gilded Age of post-Civil War materialism, Whitman's patriotism had soured, prompting him to write in "Democratic Vistas":

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease …. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in.

Almost a hundred and fifty years later, Whitman's critique of America rings as true today as it did in 1871.

What political corrective can poetry provide an ailing, polarized democracy? The answer lies in the single human attribute that imbues both poetry and politics with their most vital quality, namely, the imagination. Without imagination, it's impossible for both the populace and the poet to envision either memorable speech or a state where the genius of its people thrives in personal and political freedom.

Like democracy, poetry is an ongoing experiment that tests its readers' ability to "get the meanings of poems," which convey "the main things" (Whitman) in every new age.

One of the main things, if not the main thing, that gets lost in the political wear and tear of a democracy over time is a citizen's recognition of the other as him or herself, especially within a milieu of an increasingly diverse population. "The most sublime act is to set another before you," wrote William Blake in his poem "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."

Poetry serves as a literary vehicle for transporting citizens as readers "across" the transom of the self to the other, where one then discovers that she is inextricably connected to others and in so doing grasps the vital democratic calculus of the "common good."

Thomas Jefferson called the ideal of equality a "self-evident" truth. Inherent in this truth is the secular belief in the citizenry's collective capacity to wed their imaginations to reason as not only a political ideal but a safeguard against tyranny. However, this intellectual marriage is always only the start of democracy.

Democracy's maintenance is the hard part, requiring continuous political balance on a high demotic wire in which citizens, despite their party affiliations, strive to sustain their vision of themselves in others, despite their ethnic, philosophical and political differences, and in so doing expand themselves within the matrix of diversity into larger selves that, as Whitman claimed, "contain multitudes."

Courage serves as that human gyroscope that keeps a people, a nation, steady on this wire. With the world in the dire state of political and environmental crisis that it is, Americans need desperately to find new common ground by simply imagining the lives of others, no matter how different, and in so doing exercise their genius for democracy.

Reading poetry helps prepare any citizen for this salvific undertaking that's both political, literary, and ultimately, liberating. The spirit is as vulnerable to moral malady as the body is to disease. The country is a political body.

The voices of such American and international poets as Osip Mandelstam, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich, C.K.Williams, Zbignew Herbert, Patricia Smith, Czelaw Milosz, Ruth Stone, Wendell Berry, Lucille Clifton, Ilya Kaminsky, Carolyn Forché, Joy Harjo, Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley, Elizabeth Bishop, to mention just a few, cry out with "good medicine."

— Chard deNiord, a professor of English at Providence College, is the poet laureate of Vermont and the author of six books of poetry, most recently "Interstate" and "The Double Truth."