| This dissertation examines a fleeting moment in late nineteenth century cultural history in which religious liberalism, democratic political theory, and a new enthusiasm about the possibilities of science combined in the poetry of Walt Whitman to create a pseudo-religious movement known as Whitmanism. Much has already been written about Whitman's views of both religion and science, but there is a significant gap in Whitman studies, and in American intellectual history more generally, regarding Whitman's unique role in the transition from nineteenth century idealism to twentieth century empiricism. This study reveals that a surprisingly large and diverse group of late nineteenth century intellectuals received his work in this context: as the scripture of a culture in flux, poised between the doctrinal religions of the antebellum years and the secularized culture of turn-of-the-century America. The often-hyperbolic devotions of "Whitmaniacs" like John Burroughs and Anne Gilchrist have long inspired the derision of cultural historians, but this dissertation discovers a number of prominent liberal intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, including American Free Religionists and British Free Thinkers, who were similarly drawn to Whitman's verse for its blending of science and spirit, and for its resemblance to the new scriptural texts they had been theorizing since the collapse of their doctrinal, Bibliocentric faiths. To a surprising degree, "Whitmaniacs," Free Religionists---former Unitarians and second-wave Transcendentalists including Moncure Conway, O.B. Frothingham, Frank Sanborn and Cyrus Bartol---and even pre-eminent academics like William James came to believe that Whitman's poetry addressed their post-Darwinian crises of faith. And their attentions encouraged the explicitly religious mode of Whitman's late poems. Thus from the late 1860s, when the era of "Whitmania" began, to the early 1900s, when Whitman's idealism and his homoerotics simultaneously fell into disfavor in American culture, Leaves of Grass was almost universally received as an "American Bible" and one of the most important expressions of the age's religious humanism. This dissertation re-evaluates the literary efforts of Whitman and his followers, recovers lost connections between the poet and a transatlantic community of religious radicals, and resituates Whitman as the self-conscious bard of Free Religious ideals. |
