Super Whitman 1855

Abstract

This article tracks several thematic, formal, and political confluences between Walt Whitman's poetry and the superhero genre. To that end, I read the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) through the optics of the popular superhero, a staple of US culture that Whitman proleptically announced and whose interpretive frame, I argue, revitalizes Whitman's democratic vision. Whereas this vision has often been dismissed as naïve, if not outright jingoistic, its rearticulation as a superhero narrative opens up a non- omplacent democratic culture attentive to deliberation, dialogue, and dissent. For instance, despite Whitman's self-fashioning as a proto-vigilante superhero, his poems evince superheroes' uneasy fit—as extralegal defenders of the law—in a democraticsociety. After locating this tension between individual and popular sovereignty in political theory, superhero studies, and Whitman's early works and influences, I confirm the democratic usefulness of a superhero-inspired return to Whitman by examining a comics adaptation of Leaves of Grass: Robert Sikoryak's Song of Myself! (2013). Through an aesthetic borrowed from Marvel's comics of the Silver Age (1956-1969), Sikoryak unearths unexpected connections between Whitman's poetry, superheroes, and a deliberative public sphere—an experimental collision worth considering in light of rising populisms and disaffection.