"There's something almost adolescent about Whitman's paean to everything that was and remains good about America"
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Calling Whitman “almost adolescent” is a double move: a compliment smuggled inside a gentle takedown. Anita Diamant isn’t dismissing him as naive so much as pointing to the particular emotional voltage of his patriotism - the big, unembarrassed gush of someone still convinced the country can contain every body, every job, every river, every desire. “Paean” signals reverence, but it also hints at performance: Whitman doesn’t merely observe America, he sings it into coherence. Diamant’s phrasing nudges us to hear both the beauty and the risk in that stance.
The subtext is about taste and timing. Modern readers, trained by history to flinch at national self-congratulation, often prefer irony to rapture. Whitman’s voice can feel like a teenager’s: all appetite, all openness, allergic to nuance, certain that inclusiveness alone can alchemize contradictions. Diamant’s “almost” matters; it preserves the possibility that what reads as youthful is also strategic - a refusal to let cynicism be mistaken for sophistication.
Contextually, this lands in a late-20th/early-21st century America where the “good about America” feels contested, even weaponized, and where optimism is routinely treated as propaganda unless it comes with footnotes. Diamant frames Whitman as a writer whose generosity is both his aesthetic signature and his political wager: the idea that an expansive “yes” can be an ethical act, even when reality keeps offering reasons to say “no.”
The subtext is about taste and timing. Modern readers, trained by history to flinch at national self-congratulation, often prefer irony to rapture. Whitman’s voice can feel like a teenager’s: all appetite, all openness, allergic to nuance, certain that inclusiveness alone can alchemize contradictions. Diamant’s “almost” matters; it preserves the possibility that what reads as youthful is also strategic - a refusal to let cynicism be mistaken for sophistication.
Contextually, this lands in a late-20th/early-21st century America where the “good about America” feels contested, even weaponized, and where optimism is routinely treated as propaganda unless it comes with footnotes. Diamant frames Whitman as a writer whose generosity is both his aesthetic signature and his political wager: the idea that an expansive “yes” can be an ethical act, even when reality keeps offering reasons to say “no.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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