Robert Park Reading Walt Whitman: “Song of Myself” as Human Ecology (original) (raw)

Abstract

This paper tracks the reception history of “Song of Myself” across the career of Robert Ezra Park, a lifelong Whitman devotee and one of the most influential figures in early U.S. sociology. Situating Park’s 1930 lecture on the poet to the Chicago Walt Whitman Fellowship within the development of his groundbreaking work on “human ecology,” I show how “Song of Myself” explained to Park the discipline’s fundamental relationship between social institutions and biological inheritance. In Whitman’s desire to “turn and live with animals,” rather than cope with the complications and tacit rules of social interaction, “Song” staged a socialized individual’s longing to escape from human culture into a pre-social past, throwing into relief a foundational principle of Park’s social theory. I contextualize this reception history in relation to the current scholarship in the rhetoric of science, portraying the various ways that Whitman’s presence haunted the conception of sociological research in the United States.

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