Day's Schedule and Beyond

“[The formation of the nation] all fit into an identical pattern: that of the self-manifestation of the national personality.”
Etienne Balibar, The Nation Form: History and Ideology

Literatures, particularly the ones written in the formation of the nation, play an important role not only in helping the people at that time identify with the national spirit, but also influences the future generations, who can fall back on these works and perceive them as “traditions lived as the trace of an immemorial past (even when they have been fabricated … in the recent past)”. Walt Whitman, a literary figure in the 1800, realizes his importance in the formation of America. He expresses what he thinks as the national spirit in his literatures in hope to construct a coherent community. Before the civil war, Whitman sports an optimistic, confident outlook on the nation’s spirit: The “poetical nature [of America]”, he bolstered in his 1855 preface to The Leaves of Grass, is simultaneously “largest and most stirring” and “tame and orderly”. By tracing back to the traditions developed since the American Revolution war, where the common American people fought and triumphed over the ruling caste of England, Whitman invokes the national spirit as the liberation of the common people and “always most in the common people”. However, Whitman’s confidence in America’s capacity for this ideal was cast into doubt by the civil war. The civil war, “a conflict between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity”, agitates Whitman as he attempts balance the importance of the nation’s ideal against the cost of this ideal in bloodsheds. This doubt lingers even after the war, for Whitman confesses in his 1872 preface to leaves of grass that he is “not so certain” of his previous (opinions before the Civil War) “imperious conviction” about the nation. One can infer that although troubled by the carnage of the Civil war, Whitman settles with the conclusion that such conflict is unavoidable to preserve the national ideals and to preserve the union under these ideals as “one and the same identity”.
To form America as a singular, coherent community, Whitman must construct America as “a form of community instituted by the nation distinguished specifically from other historical communities.” To fulfill this requirement, Whitman distinguish U.S. from European nations by elevating the common virtues to a sacred importance, a virtue developed since the Revolution war, as opposed to the traditional ideal that the governing church-state being sacred.
“Though, thou, the Ideal Man,
Fair, able, beautiful, content, and loving,
Complete in body and dilate in spirit,
Be though my God.”

Whitman expresses his worship(?) to the ideal man in this stanza. In doing so, he lends people confidence in their own significance and sacredness. This contrasts the orthodox notion of religion in Europe, where the central church and monarchy, chosen by god himself, should exert their rulings upon the people. Where traditional European relies on “monarchical power became autonomous and sacred” to draw their national spirit, Whitman uses the ideal of the Revolutionary war, the overturning of monarchical power to the power of the commons, as the source of national identity. This idea is further supported in his 1855 preface, where Whitman writes, “There will soon be no more preists. Their work Is done.” To Whitman, the priest embodies precisely the ruling church-state that America fought hard to overthrown, and the idea of a centralized religion dictating the common people should be banished from America. Instead, religion shall be “the priests of man” and the people should no longer need an authoritative figure, being sacred themselves. This technique exemplifies Balibar’s theory on forming the “imaginary” of the country, for he states the importance of “[a community] recognizes itself in advance… as ‘its own’ in opposition to other states” before the actual proclamation of “the institution of the state”. Whitman correctly anticipates the underlying notion that the nation has developed that the commoners and their liberation from the ruling caste should be held in religious importance.
Whitman’s ideal that the liberation of common is put to the test by the civil war. In the 1855 preface, Whitman sees liberty as “sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship and calling no man master”. Whitman’s distain toward slavery, marking it as “put back a helpless innocent person into the grip of the grippers”, surfaces with the ideology of the Civil War. Whitman is torn between the importance of the ideal he has extrapolated for the nation and the brutal realities of the war fought in the name of this ideal.