"Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of our people"
About this Quote
Whitman is bragging, but it is the kind of brag that tries to manufacture a nation. “Vitality” is doing double duty here: it’s energy, creativity, democratic legitimacy, even sexual and spiritual aliveness. In Europe, he implies, life is hoarded by “a few, a class” - aristocracy, intelligentsia, anyone with a title, a salon, or a gatekeeping job. America, in his telling, runs on the “bulk,” a word that refuses elegance. It’s meat-and-potatoes vocabulary for a meat-and-potatoes people.
The intent is cultural warfare by way of compliment. Whitman isn’t describing the United States so much as issuing an invitation to believe in it. He’s pushing back against Old World hierarchy and the anxious American habit of seeking validation from European “culture.” His subtext is also self-interested in a way that feels almost charming: if vitality lives in the masses, then the poet who sings the masses becomes the nation’s essential artist. That’s Whitman’s whole project in Leaves of Grass - to make literature roomy enough to fit workers, bodies, immigrants, slang, and sweat.
Context matters because the line lands inside a 19th-century America still trying to define “we,” with democracy expanding for some while excluding many (enslaved people, women, Indigenous nations). The grandeur of “bulk of our people” is aspirational, even evasive. It’s a democratic myth with a pulse: stirring, strategic, and not entirely innocent.
The intent is cultural warfare by way of compliment. Whitman isn’t describing the United States so much as issuing an invitation to believe in it. He’s pushing back against Old World hierarchy and the anxious American habit of seeking validation from European “culture.” His subtext is also self-interested in a way that feels almost charming: if vitality lives in the masses, then the poet who sings the masses becomes the nation’s essential artist. That’s Whitman’s whole project in Leaves of Grass - to make literature roomy enough to fit workers, bodies, immigrants, slang, and sweat.
Context matters because the line lands inside a 19th-century America still trying to define “we,” with democracy expanding for some while excluding many (enslaved people, women, Indigenous nations). The grandeur of “bulk of our people” is aspirational, even evasive. It’s a democratic myth with a pulse: stirring, strategic, and not entirely innocent.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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