444 EURAMERICA has nevertheless posited the US as the hegemonic leader of the world.58 Furthermore, I want to suggest that this perfect congruence between Whitman and the Amerian nation may actually explain his later canonization as the American poet, which then collaterally secured the survival and eventual dissemination of his more radical visions. Various critics have attempted to explain Whitman’s slow but “inevitable” canonization in American literature and, despite their differences, all agree to a high degree of fulfillment of (even collusion with) the ideological demands of American (literary) nationalism on his part.59 Yet they all seem to miss the point put forth here, one that can be further illustrated by a short detour through Henry Abelove’s (2003: 29-41) articulation of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden with the 1990s’ activist group, Queer Nation. Toward the end of his short but meandering essay, Abelove eventually comes to the significant fact that Thoreau moved to his lakeside cabin on the Fourth of July, thus beginning his “eccentric” (29, 32)—read: non-domestic, amatrimonial, and erotically homosocial—life at a date that symbolizes the birth of the American nation, a gesture that Abelove regards as significantly betokening his “identification with the nation” as well as the identity of “[h]is project and the nation’s” (39). That is, despite his defiant stance, Thoreau still needs the (American) nation “for legitimation, for inspiration, for a forum for his cultural production”; in other words, 40-41). 58 As Erkkila insightfully comments, Whitman was “mythologizing America’s political system not as a system but as the system, whose spread over the entire earth is represented as both natural and inevitable. This celebration of American democracy as the superior political system and the American race as the superior breed continues at the very center of later editions of Leaves of Grass” (1994: 67). And quite a few studies point out that this sense of US superiority on Whitman’s part is not just jingoistic but racial at base, which consisted in a strong AngloSaxonism and hierarchical denigration of all other races and ethnicities; see, e.g., Kim (2006). 59 Morris (1995: 27-53), Beach (1996: 36-41), Bloom (1995: 247-271).
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