Matt Van Hook – Constituting America

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

The essays in our study reference the following edition of Democracy In America: University of Chicago Press – 1st edition translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Today’s essay references pages 458 – 469 (stop at Chp. 20 heading) of this edition of Democracy in America.

Democracy in America, Vol II, Part II, Chapter I – “Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and more Lasting Love for Equality than for Freedom”
By the time De Tocqueville’s readers arrive at his chapter on the sources of poetry in democratic nations, he has already passed his preliminary judgment that “Up to the present, America has had only a very few remarkable writers; it has not had great historians and does not count one poet.” The few American writers known to Europeans, such as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, were read because they stoked fascination for those trying to understand America and its revolution. The “poems of democracy” might hold similar explanatory power and purpose, but they fall short of De Tocqueville’s definition of true poetry as “the search for and depiction of the ideal.” In America he searches for the poetic instead of true poetry.

Poetry aimed at the ideal “will not have for its goal to represent the true, but to adorn it, and to offer a superior image to the mind.” In democratic social states, however, the true and ideal are wrapped up together in “material enjoyments” that spark only a certain kind of limited imagination—Gatsby’s fabulous and conspicuous wealth, the savvy monopolists’ conquering of a system from railroads to software, the investigative journalists’ takedown of these sorts. They represent only the “ideal” of real people doing practical things well without the assistance of aristocratic position, divine intervention, or magic. Democratic social states pull the poets’ imaginations down from the clouds and confine them to “the visible and real world.” So it should not surprise De Tocqueville’s readers then or now that, like the relentless sun over the great American desert, equality has dried up the old sources of poetry. New sources of poetry must emerge from a world entirely new, and De Tocqueville describes this occurring in two phases.

When estates that span centuries no longer survive a single generational split, and names and titles are scarcely known even as historical artifacts, the democratic poets first turned toward “inanimate nature” to fill the void. The Mississippi River and Appalachian Mountains replaced the lost objects of aristocratic imagination. This temporary turn, however, was only the brief transition to the true democratic turn inward. De Tocqueville is “convinced that in the long term democracy turns the imagination away from all that is external to man to fix it only on man.” This inward turn toward the human race has great potential for the poetic, but only if it can be made to think of humanity’s shape and future. Can such a turn be expected from Americans living in a social state of equality? As De Tocqueville explains, “One can conceive of nothing so small, so dull, so filled with miserable interests, in a word, so antipoetic, as the life of a man in the United States.” Enter Emily Dickinson stage left. One can almost imagine a ten-year-old Dickinson picking up the newly released second volume of Democracy in America, reading this chapter, and determining to fulfill the author’s expectations for distinctively American poems. These examinations of small souls are not poetry proper but there is still something poetic to be found in them.

While De Tocqueville seems to predict the arrival of Dickinson, Whitman, Frost and other democratic poets willing to mine the mundane for transcendent ideas, he fears a more extreme future. He expects that the bombastic language, already so prevalent in American writing, will saturate poetry as well, and “the works of democratic poets will often offer immense and incoherent images, overloaded depictions, and bizarre composites in imaginations that depart from reality rather than adorn the ideal.” He finds this already taking place in the theaters where spectacle rules, though admittedly still bounded in his time by a remnant of Puritan cultural restraints and township laws. De Tocqueville’s theater chapter provides a fitting bookend to his discussion of poetry because his readers can imagine the democratic poetry of America combining spectacle, passions, and ideas with the smallness of a single democratic soul longing for achievable human greatness. When searching for the democratic poetry of the present, one need only look to the spoken word poetry, music of the blues, and other distinctly American sources that come together on stage in Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton!

Matthew Van Hook received his doctoral degree in political science from the University of Notre Dame with a focus on political theory, constitutional studies and American political thought. He also holds a master’s degree in security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Prior to joining the Torrey Honors College faculty, Van Hook served on active duty as an Air Force pilot and political science professor at his alma mater, the US Air Force Academy. His research and published work ranges from the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln to politics and law in the novels of Harper Lee.

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