I seem to be searching for a new politics; I don’t know quite what, but something. After a while I’ll be altogether without a political home unless I build one for myself.

We need a new politics. Our politics need a big lift to some higher plane—something of the human to supplant the political order. Has not the time come, indeed, when politics should ascend into atmospheres and regions hitherto unknown (far, far different from the miserable business that of late and current years passes under that name) and take rank with science, philosophy, and art?
And it will come, too—maybe not soon, maybe not for some time, but it will come. It must come; without it our democracy will go to the devil—nothing can save it. But we probably will not get it until some more important issues make the lift worthwhile.

I am not looking to politics to renovate politics. I am looking to forces outside—the great moral, spiritual forces—and these stick to their work, through thick and thin, through the mire and the mirage, until the proper time, and then assume control. 

Great is liberty, without extinction is liberty—
Libertad and the divine average!
For the sake of him I typify, for the common average man’s sake,
At last, only the average man of a land is important.

One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person, nor cease at the theme of one’s-self,
Yet utter the word of the modern, the word en masse.
What does civilization itself rest upon—and what object has it, with its religions, arts, schools, etc.—but rich, luxuriant, varied personalism?
Yet we must not give too much importance to personalism—it is easy to overcharge it. Man moves as man, in all the great achievements—man in the great mass. The influence and coloring of the great oceanic mass called society carries every member along with it. No person can entirely escape from it, whether he will or no.

Individual and society—the problem, I say, is to combine the two, so as not to ignore either; our task is to reconcile them. At present they are contradictory—there are opposite sides, as to every great question—their oppositions form a serious problem and paradox.
But the theory and practice of both sovereignties, contradictory as they are, are necessary. The two will merge, and will mutually profit and brace each other, and from them a greater product, a third, will arise. Out of the fusing of these twain, opposite as they are, I seek to make a homogeneous song.

So be individualistic, be individualistic; but be not too damned individualistic. The mass, for imperative reasons, is to be ever carefully weigh’d, borne in mind, and provided for—only from it, and from its proper regulation and potency, comes the chance of individualism. The supply of such individualities wholly depends on a compacted ensemble; the main sustenance for highest separate personality is to come from that general sustenance of the aggregate, (as air, earth, rains, give sustenance to a tree.)

The final meaning of democracy is to put in practice the idea of the sovereignty, license, sacredness of the individual. This idea isolates, for reasons, each separate man and woman in the world. Yet by itself alone, the fullness of individuality, even the sanest, would surely destroy itself. Personality, by democratic standards, will only be fully coherent, grand, and free through the cohesion, grandeur, and freedom of the common aggregate. Democracy infers loving comradeship as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself.

O organic compacts! I am come to be your born poet!
The idea of love fuses and combines the whole,
We need satisfiers, joiners, lovers.

Yet with all the necessities and benefits of association, the valuable and well-settled statement of our duties and relations in society, (and the world cannot get along without it,) the true nobility and satisfaction of a man consist in his thinking and acting for himself.
The idea of perfect individualism it is indeed that deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the aggregate—the building up of the masses by building up grand individuals. It is mainly or altogether to serve independent separatism that we favor a strong generalization, consolidation. 

The forming of a great aggregate nation is, perhaps, altogether through the forming of myriads of fully develop’d and enclosing individuals—the nation as a common aggregate of living identities, affording in each a separate and complete subject with a fair chance for worldly thrift and happiness, for growth, for freedom.

An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation.
Two main constituents for a truly grand nationality:
1st, a large variety of character,
2nd, full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions.

NEXT: FREEDOM AND LAW

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).