From Language to Empire: Walt Whitman in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Popular Anglo-Saxonism

Heidi Kathleen Kim

doi:10.13008/2153-3695.1805

Essays

From Language to Empire: Walt Whitman in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Popular Anglo-Saxonism

Abstract

Examines Whitman's relationship to nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism (as seen in such periodicals as The Anglo-Saxon) and proposes that "his vocabulary of Anglo-Saxonism problematizes his call for equality and universality," producing tensions in his work--"his changing focus from language to racial superiority and then to the postbellum negation of that superiority demonstrates the complexity of Whitman's politics"-and leading him after 1860 to employ "both new vocabulary and new ideas which actively contradict the familiar strains of Anglo-Saxonism."

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How to Cite: Kim, H. K. (2006) “From Language to Empire: Walt Whitman in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Popular Anglo-Saxonism”, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. 24(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.1805