Entry nº 47: Walt Whitman Poem Analysis: ‘The sum of all known value and respect I add up in you whoever you are’

The first line of the poem is quite significative since he exclaims: " The sum of all known value and respect I add up in you whoever you are; the " I " is not the individual but the collective American Ego, whose voice he believes himself to be. As representative democratic bard, Whitman exhibits complete freedom from conventionality, a very deep human love, hope for all, faith in the rationality of the world, courage, energy, and the instinct of solidarity, as shown in the line:” The sum of all known value and respect I add up in you whoever you are ”; As he writes in these poem from "A Song for .Occupations," "The President is up there in the White House for you... it is not you who are here for him," a sentence not to be judged by the standards of descriptive accuracy but to be invoked as a rallying cry.
Whitman wants to help America to find her soul. A future given up to the despotism of business, to the sway of the smart, vulgar, money-making animal, to dyspeptic middle-class religionism, to the election of lying rogues to office, to the universal reign of the mediocre and the commonplace this is indeed a future from which the human race may well shrink.
This anthropocentric position in literature as in philosophy will produce vast results. The State, religion, industry will be directed solely towards the good of man. In times past, humanity has been sacrificed to regal power, to the assumed rights of a caste, to the supposed claims of an external deity on the implicit obedience of his creatures. Today man is enslaved to money-making, in thrall to machinery, a weary drudge attendant on the incessant demands of the iron monster which he serves. All these forms of slavery are at variance with democracy, every one must be abolished root and branch. The State exists for no other purpose than to realise the collective will of its subjects. If a man sees nothing divine in himself and his fellows, he shall find no divinity in the world at all, this is expressed in the third stanza:
“All doctrines, all politics and civilization exurge from you,All sculpture and monuments and anything inscribed anywhere are tallied in you,The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reach is in you this hour _ and myths and tales the same;If you were not breathing and walking here where would they all be?” Whitman is saying that industry shall clothe, feed, and comfort men; man shall not be the slave of the machine. This is the meaning of democracy. It is no crude theory of negation. It does not deny the validity of the great institutions and ideas which have for untold ages expressed in form or language, in sacrificial rite and sacred hymn, the spiritual life of man. But it transforms and develops these, it expresses them in terms of thought, it seeks to raise humanity to loftier heights through their agency.
In the lines addressed "To You," the poet speaks from his heart to the average man, like in the lines: “The sum of all known value and respect I add up in you whoever you are;”... “If you were not breathing and walking here where would they all be?”;... “All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it; Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?” To state Whitman’s fundamental democratic ideas in as concise a way as is possible. He is, at the outset, neither absolutely collectivist nor individualist. The care and culture of the individual, his spiritual growth, is, indeed, the final end. The whole vast array and pomp of nature exists to form spiritual individuals. The individual is no mere function of a social whole, no mere cog or pin in the machinery.
Yet, on the other hand, he sees that the spiritual individual is made a reality by the social whole of which he is a part. The engineer on the train is not a part of the machinery, but a human being having the same desires as the President or the Secretary of State.
He always comes at last to the individual, no doubt. But that individual is a mere undifferentiated potentiality by himself ; his spiritual life is only possible through his interaction with the social whole.
Historically, Whitman belonged to that remarkable generation of American writers who created the Church of the Self. They believed that each of us should be God to ourself, that our highest authority should by our inmost thoughts and feelings. This idea is reflected in the last stanza.
In conclusion, this poem should be read as a manifesto of values, a guide to a worthy life. Whitman stands at the birth of a vast modern world, whose future growth he seeks to penetrate. It is not egotism, it is the identification of a great individual nature with the spirit and life of modern humanity.