Abstract
Negative rhetoric can clear a space in discourse for cultural and intellectual transformation. By saying no to prevailing orthodoxies, negative gestures, as Budick and Iser describe them, have a way of ‘allowing the unsayable to speak for itself’ (xi). This aspect of negative rhetoric was especially important for Walt Whitman, as C. Carroll Hollis has shown in characterizing what he calls Whitman’s “platform poetry” of the first three editions (125–26, 136–145). Whitman’s democratic poetics endeavors to equalize that which Western culture has tended to regard as antithetical: body and soul, self and others, the many and the one, God and humanity. He creates an argumentative context for these radical claims through rhetorical negation:
I have said that the soul is not more than the body
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is.1
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Levine, H.J. (1994). Beyond Negation: Paradoxical Affirmation in Whitman’s Third Edition. In: Fischlin, D. (eds) Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8291-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8291-9_8
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