Poetry in America: Representing Equality Through Accounts of Poetry in Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Stuart Mill

Abstract

This dissertation explores the relationship between political and literary practices. Highlighting the connection between American literature and democratic theory that appears in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Stuart Mill, my project considers how the fate of poetry in the new world joins poetical theory to aesthetic practice, and both to the practices of citizenship. For all three nineteenth-century theorists (and critics) of democracy, the representation of American citizens as readers and writers of poetry becomes a productive site for the dramatization of political practices and likewise, for navigating familiar tensions among democracy, egalitarian norms, and human flourishing. In developing this analysis I show how their respective accounts of poetry incorporate the idioms of their political projects, thus extending the promises and pitfalls of democratic equality to literature. I suggest that in so doing, they present the American democratic “experiment” as in part a literary project. Chapter One considers Tocqueville’s career-long appeals to poetry as part and parcel of his effort to diagnose and remediate the problematic relationship between private individuals and a tutelary state. Poetry, I argue, offers a version of his intermediary bodies writ literary. Chapter Two explores Emerson’s account of poetry as a means of cultivating and enacting admiration for the great while avoiding the worshipful, thus subordinate, postures such admiration risks. By capturing the beauty of ordinary and meager subjects, poetry becomes for Emerson a project of augmenting the aesthetic value of the lives of democratic citizens. Chapter Three examines Mill’s essays on poetry, which he presents as a mode of communication enabling authentic expression without the constraints imposed by democratic conditions. In incorporating the idioms of intimate exchange, Mill’s idealized notion of poetic utterance suggests that citizen-interlocutors might overcome the pernicious effects of democratic publicity through indirect address. This project expands on recent work concerning the diversity of writing genres pertinent to democratic theory, by recovering literary practices and relations as key elements in the political thought of Tocqueville, Emerson, and Mill. I argue that poetry orients each thinker to the relationship between democratic equality and human flourishing: overlooking how poetry articulates and nurtures this relationship, I suggest, occludes the role of literary writing in both contributing new visions of democratic equality and in giving those new visions worldly form.