The American Renaissance and Walking as a Symbol of Democracy

Allen Ginsberg, in a 1991 essay titled "Taking a Walk through Leaves of Grass," christened Walt Whitman the "prophet of American democracy." The 19th-century poet was certainly deepply aware of the vastness of his young country, the diversity within its borders and what he perceived to be total potential. His poetry, a free-verse catalogue of every facet of the American experience, every facet of the American population, is no less than democracy manifest in art. On the poem "Song of Myself," Ginsberg remarks that it is "a long survey of America ... in which he extended his own awareness to encompass the entire basic spiritual awareness of America, trying to make an ideal America that would be an America of comradely awareness, acknowledgement of tenderness, acknowledgement of gentleness, acknowledgement of comradeship, acknowledgement of what he called adhesiveness."

Published first in the second edition of Leaves of Grass, "Song of the Open Road" is precisely Whitman's call for the realization of the spiritual and material democracy he so believed in. "Allons!" he cries again and again, beckoning the reader, the body of America, to come forth and conquer the New Zion. "Allons! the road is before us! / It is safe — I have tried it — my own feet have tried it well — be not detain'd!" The open road, in Whitman's view, is a uniquely American symbol of absolute freedom, framed as a sort of pilgrimage that everyone, "the black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas'd, the illiterate person," must take. But the poem revels in its own contradictions, the narrator much later adamanatly stating, "No diseas'd person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted here." It's the exact sort of contradiction inherent to American democracy, between the ideal and the real, and so there's little surprise it remains unresolved here. 

One is reminded of Whitman's famous proclamation: "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Henry David Thoreau, another key figure of the American Renaissance, is no less contradictory but perhaps much more explicitly individualist from the start. His 1862 essay "Walking" is also much more clearly about the American commitment to move westward, a fact of the era that is only implicit in Whitman's poem. "We go eastward to realize history and to study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure." Like Whitman, there's an absolute freedom to walking and Thoreau believes it to be, in som way, deeply connected to the country he was born in. Also like Whitman, the act is imbued with a religious necessity, the "unexplored" edges of the country being positioned as Canaan. "So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn."

There's an economic freedom to the issue as well, especially for Thoreau whose use of the word "enterprise" has already brought to mind the laissez-faire American economy. At the same time, Thoreau doesn't seem to be advocating for an unregulated capitalist economy so much as he is advocating for the total freedom from political economy in general. "No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freeodm, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God." To be a walker then, in Thoreau's eyes, is to be totally free from material need, which is why he so pities the shopmen, blacksmiths, and other workers he sees sitting in their place of work rather than walking the country. The American ideal is a country of manna and necter, Thoreau seems to be saying, but the increasingly industrial economic system seems to stand in direct contrast to that.