{"id":378,"date":"2026-07-23T14:07:50","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T21:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/?page_id=378"},"modified":"2026-07-25T10:08:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T17:08:07","slug":"walt-whitman","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/essays\/walt-whitman\/","title":{"rendered":"Walt Whitman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/digitalcommons.chapman.edu\/cgi\/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&amp;context=english_articles\">My essay on Whitman and Hegel <\/a>is the fruit of three years of meditation on the relationship between selfhood and poetic form. The idea is that Whitman&#8217;s organic form is an expression of the modern conception of the ground of selfhood as what Isaiah Berlin called positive freedom. Sounds complex? Maybe it is, but it&#8217;s a value of mine to present complexity as clearly and directly as possible. Both the virtue and the limit of my argument &#8212; and of Hegel for modernity, I would say &#8212; are expressed in this passage from late in the essay:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;One may escape the pressure to define a community&#8217;s laws in terms of an autonomous rationality, but one cannot define an actual ethical sphere based on identifications without some horizon of exclusion.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My essay on Whitman and Hegel is the fruit of three years of meditation on the relationship between selfhood and poetic form. The idea is that Whitman&#8217;s organic form is an expression of the modern conception of the ground of selfhood as what Isaiah Berlin called positive freedom. Sounds complex? Maybe it is, but it&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"parent":30,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-378","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":382,"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/378\/revisions\/382"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.chapman.edu\/bglaser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}