440 EURAMERICA never be a way to pinpoint the exact contents of Whitman’s homopolitical agenda for sure, the possibities at least have been circumscribed somewhere in between these possible models discussed here. III. Both Multicultural Internationalism and American Homonationalism It is evident from the earliest editions of Leaves that Whitman intended his (homo)political project to be an intervention on the national scale, so much so that he even idiosyncratically nationalized himself as the very embodiment of the American nation. Not only emphatically declaring himself “Walt Whitman, an American” since the very first edition (1855: 29; 1st poem, later “Song of Myself”)— which was foregrounded even further as the phrase became the poem’s first title in the next edition (1856: 5)48—he also imagined himself as “incarnating this land” (184; “Poem of Many in One,” later “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”):49 “If the Atlantic coast stretch, or the Pacific coast stretch, he stretching with them north or south, / Spanning between them east and west, and touching whatever is between them” (185). And probably because of this overidentification, Whitman, despite the interventionary nature of his project, seldom if ever criticized the US in Leaves.50 Instead, he 48 However, the title was changed to just “Walt Whitman” from the 1860-1861 to the 1871 editions (hereafter it became “Song of Myself”), and the phrase “an American” was also deleted from the poem since the 1867 edition; see Whitman (2002: 45, n. 2). 49 The poem is considered to be the poetic version of the 1855 preface as some of its lines are directly taken from the latter (see Whitman [2002: 286, n. 1] for details). 50 To be fair, Whitman did criticize America—for example in Democratic Vistas, he censured rather sharply “our materialistic and vulgar American democracy” (1892: 247, n.) that deterred comradeship—but his critiques occurred mostly outside Leaves (except for the prefaces to its different editions); see Loving (2000), Erkkila (1989: 246-259).
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