“The Queer Dialectic of Whitman's Nation: ‘Let' in “Respondez”

Originally published as "poem of the propositions of Nakedness" in 1856, then without a title in 1860, the poem that we know as "Respondez" only appeared as such in the 1867 and 1871-72 Leaves of Grass. If, as Sam Abrams claims, "Respondez" is "a poem widely regarded as the most important in the entire Whitman corpus" then it occupies a strangely marginal position in that corpus (32). Easily overlooked because of its exclusion from the first and final editions, the poem is better known to a few critics of Whitman than it is to a general readership. It is probably best known to other poets—and is, ironically, more often printed in anthologies and selections than "complete" editions of Leaves of Grass. Nonetheless the poem as a whole merits careful attention, if only because here we have a different Whitman from the familiar one: a Whitman who is not the national poet of America, but rather a prophet of a queer and anarchic global modernity. By looking closely at the form, specifically Whitman's use of the stylistically anaphoric "Let," this essay reveals instability at the heart of the problem of interpreting "Respondez." As Marshall McLuhan seemed to recognize in his resetting of Whitman's lines, the role of this small word is much larger than one might think. Grammatically, "let" can function as a first or third person imperative auxillary, but it can also function as an optative subjunctive, expressing desire rather than command. This grammatical instability casts light on the complex nature of the national, or rather international political engagement of "Respondez," and on the changing relation of Whitman's poetry to global capitalism from 1856 to 1892.