The Leader as Poet: Tennyson, Whitman and Dickinson

Abstract

Like dark matter in the universe, chaos comprises a great deal of the reality of the leader’s world. An intrinsic element of human experience, chaos is depicted by canonical writers of the nineteenth century in a vision that is integral to leadership studies.

‘The world is too much with us’, sighed William Wordsworth in 1802. Yet if he would flee the world’s realities, fellow poets in the literary pantheon of the nineteenth century did not. In form and theme, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), Walt Whitman (1819–92) and Emily Dickinson (1830–86) are worldly. At first glance, the iconic Lord, Bard of the barbaric yawp, and fluttery Myth of Amherst have little in common, much less relevance to leadership studies. While Tennyson was an official poet laureate, and descended from a king, Whitman was a self-appointed (and self-promoting) people’s poet, and Dickinson, although a congressman’s daughter, described herself as ‘nobody’. Tennyson wrote commissioned pieces for royalty. Whitman charged himself to write for the masses to promote democracy. Dickinson was a private poet in selfexile, unable to participate in or contribute to the public sphere. Tennyson was famous, Whitman was a literary outsider who self-published and felt largely ignored during his life, and Dickinson was unpublished in her lifetime.