It seems doubtful that the sitting US president will have spent much time with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But I feel confident that several of his lines in the “Song of Myself” might still resonate with Donald Trump. “I know perfectly well”, the poet says, “my own egotism”. Whitman is not alone in this self-consciousness. “I chant the chant of dilation or pride”, he goes on, “I show that size is only development”. A line like that could be the motto of any New York property developer. Whitman then asks, bringing a rare end-rhyme to development: “Have you outstripped the rest? are you the President?” Mr Trump could coolly answer: Yes.

With all this in mind, it is worth noting that Whitman penned a fair number of fraternal lines about China. In a poem of delirious cosmopolitanism, “Salut au monde”, he claimed: “I see the four great rivers of China, the Amour, the Yellow River, the Yiang-tse, and the Pearl.” We would now write Whitman’s “Yiang-tse” as Yangtze and his “Amour” as Amur; but what matters is that China’s rivers were flowing in the Brooklyn poet’s mind in the middle of the 19th century.

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Whitman even went to Qing-dynasty China, in a poetic transport, to see for himself how the common people lived. “I go among them”, he dreamed. “I mix indiscriminately”. And he found the people of China to be, in the blinding light of his ecstasy, no different from him or from the Americans of his day. “Each of us [is] inevitable”, he thrummed, “Each of us [is] limitless.”

We do not know what it is in Whitman’s ultra-democratic poetry that stirred something in a young Xi Jinping. But as China’s paramount leader returns to the US for another state visit, he surely knows that America has long dreamed of his people.

And it is not only in poetic reveries that the West and China have been friendly. Before the full-bore Industrial Revolution; liberal trade policies (and concomitant trade wars); and the high-watermark of Western imperialism in Whitman’s 19th century, the West and China had several hundred years of largely peaceful cultural, commercial, and intellectual contact. From roughly 1500 to 1800, China and the West rather candidly recognized each other as the world’s most advanced civilizations. Leibniz — a baroque savant and China-watcher avant la lettre — did not hesitate to call them “the two most cultivated parts of the world”.

More recently, and no less importantly, the 21st century’s two great powers were ultimately aligned in all three of the 20th’s great contests: the First World War, Second World War, and the Cold War. This is currently better known in Beijing than it is in Washington, London, and Brussels. And, because we rarely hear it in the West, it’s worth taking each conflict in sequence.

A couple of years before Whitman’s poems began to appear in translation in the pages of the New Culture Movement’s Young China magazine, the Chinese republic declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. The casus belli was a lawless German strike, in February 1917, on a French transport ship sailing in international waters. Hundreds of Chinese nationals aboard the vessel had drowned. In March 1917, the Chinese parliament voted to break diplomatic relations with Germany. But this brought no change to Germany’s scandalous U-boat policy. In August 1917, Beijing then joined London and Paris, Petrograd and Washington in their titanic struggle against the Central Powers.

China’s man in Washington at the time was a formidable diplomat with an evocative name: Vi Kyuin Wellington Koo. In a letter printed a month or so later, in The American Journal of International Law, Wellington Koo notified the US Secretary of State of his government’s grave decision: “I have the honor to inform you that China… declares that a state of war exists with Germany and Austria-Hungary.” Notably, Wellington Koo stressed in this letter that his government would “observe all the stipulations of the conventions signed at the International Peace Conferences at The Hague”. The Republic of China, founded in 1912, would uphold the laws of “civilized warfare” that Imperial Germany had relinquished. In other words, Wellington Koo’s Asian republic was more civilized than one of Europe’s great monarchies.

In the Second World War, meanwhile, the Republic of China staked a similar claim, fighting alongside Washington in defense of civilization. But now, the lawless power China had to resist was Japan: a monarchical Asian ally of a post-monarchical Nazi Germany. On 7 December 1941, Japan struck Pearl Harbor without formally declaring war. This “treacherous” strike was made in violation of the conventional laws of war and later judged to be illegal — which is to say, uncivilized — by a postwar tribunal. The more immediate effect of Pearl Harbor was to forge a momentous link between the US and China.

Why so momentous? Well, on 1 January 1942, a statement titled the “Declaration by United Nations” was drawn up and signed at the Arcadia Conference in Washington, DC. The ur-document of the United Nations, it had four original drafters and signatories: the US, UK, USSR and China. It is no coincidence these four great powers still form the core of the UN Security Council (with France joining later). China belongs to the innermost circle of powers that created the postwar order, and the UN.

Just a couple of days after the Arcadia declaration was signed, Chiang Kai-shek — or “Generalissimo Chiang”, as he was known — accepted the “supreme command over all forces of the United Powers… in the Chinese theater”. The idea for this centralization of “United Nations” forces in Chiang’s hands came from President Roosevelt himself. And there can be no doubt that FDR had a strategic vision for what he called “the gallant people of China”. By May 1942, he was declaring that “in the future a still unconquerable China will play its proper role in maintaining peace and prosperity, not only in eastern Asia but in the whole world”.

China remained “unconquerable” at the close of the Second World War. But its anticolonial struggle had not decided the issue of a decades-long civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists. Of course, Chiang and the Republic of China did not hold the mainland; in the bitter fight for sovereignty, the Maoists prevailed. A successor republic, a “People’s Republic”, was formed in Beijing in October 1949. And with it, a steely party-state was formed which had immense debts to one of America’s other wartime allies: Stalin’s USSR.

The cruelties of China’s civil war and the fantastical complexity of early-Cold War geopolitics cannot be dealt with here. But two brief points can be made. First, China’s postwar settlement in no way cancels out the vast sacrifices made by the “gallant people” of the country during the Second World War. Second, the communist ascendancy in China was not preordained. Indeed, certain actions by the US may have moved the dial in favor of Mao and his Soviet-backed troops. Frank Dikötter has stressed in a recent book that it was FDR’s successor, President Truman, who put an arms embargo in place in 1946: not on Mao and his communist brigades, but on Generalissimo Chiang and his nationalists.

A 1946 New York Times headline tells us why: “Aid to China Hinges on Ending of Strife and Unification of Nation”. Truman confirms this in a personal note he sent to Chiang. In it, the US president made clear that his government’s “generous attitude” towards the Republic of China was highly conditional: Chiang had to demonstrate “genuine progress” towards achieving a “peaceful settlement” with Mao. In hopes of seeing a coalition government formed in Nanjing, Chiang’s capital, Truman leveraged US money and materiel, imposing more than one ceasefire which, in Dikötter’s view, “changed the course of the civil war”.

The early years of the Cold War were therefore treacherous and highly complex. There is much we still do not fully understand. But however we choose to reconstruct that era, it’s clear that a dangerous bloc-formation swiftly formed within the “Big Four” powers that built the UN: the US and UK in the “West”, the USSR and China in the “East”. And no one disputes that China, having aligned with Washington and London in the century’s first two global conflicts, took a hostile posture during the third. This revolutionary, Soviet-backed posture of Mao’s China held up for roughly two decades.

But it is surely worth noting that, for a great power with a 2,000-year history, that’s the blink of an eye. The People’s Republic of China had only been in existence for 22 years when President Nixon touched down in Beijing to make his visionary overtures in February 1972. In the years that followed, Maoist China decided to normalize relations with Washington. And, less than 20 years after that, due in part to the West’s strategic rapprochement with China, the Cold War ended.

This point is especially important. The liberal Nineties narrative of the USSR’s dissolution is highly Eurocentric — but modern China has never been a geopolitical periphery. Any rigorous account of the collapse of the USSR must frankly reckon with the fact that it was not only the Western powers, but the Western powers plus China, which created the conditions that doomed the Soviet system.

Strange to say, the US had a strategic commitment during the Cold War to what we would now call a sort of multipolarity. Cultivating ties with peripheral communist regimes was part of this strategy: Washington’s heavy investment in Tito’s Yugoslavia is a case in point. Nixon’s grand maneuver in 1972 was to invite Mao’s Beijing, a central communist regime, to form a third pole in the bipolar world order of the Seventies. And, indeed, a new pole was formed. “Without abandoning its communist trappings”, as Bruce Mazlish puts it, “China under Deng Xiaoping and his successors has been pursuing its own amalgamation of socialism, Confucianism, and capitalism in a unique blend.” The PRC’s scale is unique, too, and the systemic effects of its late-Cold War opening are often missed in Western discourse.

The triumphalist liberal narrative of the Nineties is also ideologized. Any serious account of China’s reopening to the West must reckon with the fact that it was not instigated or navigated in the early days by Western liberals. Whatever we make of this fact, the breakthrough diplomacy in China was undertaken by Western conservatives: Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, with some fine diplomatic play by Margaret Thatcher. Beijing has not forgotten who conceived its Cold War détente with the West. Nixon is highly respected in 21st-century China, as he seems to be among a growing number of young Americans.

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But China cannot be reduced to a partisan question in the West. It is too massive, too comprehensive, for that. Our ideologies do not capture it. And it cannot be stressed too heavily that it was Western diplomacy in the Seventies — not politics, not ideology — which drew Beijing back towards Washington, London, and Brussels. It was diplomacy which made “unconquerable China” a stabilizing presence in late-20th-century geopolitics.

It’s probably too much to hope for President Xi to be given a first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass during his stay in Washington, DC. But there is, in any case, a pair of words that Whitman brings forward in “Salut au monde” that still speak to the occasion. As he gazes out on the world of the 1850s, Whitman tells us that he sees “barbarisms” and “civilizations”. Not much has changed, perhaps. But this is no time for great-power barbarisms. The stakes are too high.

The task, then, is for China and the West to exemplify their long-related civilizations. Today, we’d be more likely to call them the world’s largest economic zones, and it’s tempting to see these tensions, over AI or rare earths, as insurmountable. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too quick to make the shift to brute economic calculation. For diplomacy is, ultimately, a civilizational legacy. And if diplomacy is what we need in the early 21st century, then surely we can find the strength and calm to engage in it: by returning to the deeper traditions which made several centuries of relatively peaceful trade and intellectual exchange possible between a strong China and a powerful West.

Where Americans were born and who their parents are has always been much less important than how they greeted the present moment, with one eye fixed on the road ahead and the other on the stars. Walt Whitman’s great “Song of Myself”, written in 1855 and unfolding over 52 stanzas, including accounts of sea battles and slavery, mentions not a single word about the speaker’s parents, or even what their names were.

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, in which “Song of Myself” is contained, is the fountainhead of American poetics, particularly in the 20th century. Its distinctive echo can be heard everywhere after the Second World War, from the Beats to the novels of Saul Bellow, to the highbrow confessional poems of John Berryman and Frank O’Hara. In Rock and Roll music, Whitman’s greatest late 20th-century heir was undoubtedly Bob Dylan, who eerily reproduced both Whitman’s continent-spanning meter and his love of playful self-contradiction. Try reading nearly anything Whitman wrote in Dylan’s distinctive nasal tone, and the kinship will be plain.

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is merely the latest of a series of films that have attempted to grapple with the sometimes gratifying, often alienating mixture of freedom and vertigo inherent in the American birthright through the character of the man from nowhere. If the bright side of this character can be glimpsed in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, arguably the founding work of American literature, in Whitman’s all-embracing cosmic self, and in the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger, the darkness that can accompany freedom from the past isn’t hard to find either. Natty Bumppo, the frontiersman-killer of James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, is the precursor to the ambivalent killer-hero of nearly every Western. Jay Gatsby’s invented self is ultimately more loyal and virtuous than the Long Island snobs who attend his glittering parties; it is also a lie that ends in death.

The character of Bob Dylan, the boy who ostensibly learned to play music from circus performers passing through Hibbing, Minnesota and then re-named himself after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (a fact that Dylan strenuously denied for years before admitting to in his charming autobiography Chronicles) was more or less fully fashioned even before the young performer set off to New York City to find Woody Guthrie and set the often drearily earnest world of American folk music on its ear. America has never really known Robert Zimmerman, the man who invented Bob Dylan. It has only known Bob Dylan.

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So why did the 19-year-old Zimmerman choose to become Dylan? The answer, as he told 60 Minutes interviewer Ed Bradley 20 years ago, was because those are the rules of American selfhood. “You call yourself what you want to call yourself,” Dylan responded. “This is the land of the free.”

Dylan’s self-invented character of a punk Woody Guthrie, or as a rock and roll Walt Whitman, was wildly influential in his moment, for reasons that take a moment to recover. Meanwhile, his best songs have lost none of their immediacy. Working in the genre of “original folk music” that he more or less invented, he set the rules for rock songwriting for the next half century while writing two or three dozen major and minor classics that uniquely merited the awarding of a Nobel Prize for Literature, despite the formal and functional gulf that separates song lyrics from novels and poetry.

The rules of a “Dylan song” have remained remarkably consistent over time, bringing together the worlds of Woody Guthrie, hipster downtown New York, American roots music, the blues, country and western, into a kind of primordial soup that Dylan could dip his brush into at will; he created deceptively offhand-seeming compositions governed by a rueful romanticism and a bulletproof intelligence that twists and turns like a fish in order to avoid being caught.

It is also true that the alchemy by which singer-songwriters (itself an invention of the Sixties) do their thing tends to produce a period of startling peak creativity that lasts perhaps five years, often precluding the possibility of a second act. The Beatles produced all their great records within five years, as did the Rolling Stones. Jimi Hendrix’s entire career lasted four years, as did Kurt Cobain’s.

For artists who survive their creative peak, the reward is often an afterlife with lesser access to the divine. Part of Dylan’s spectacular self-awareness, which has only rarely faltered, is that he recognized the departure of the spirit much sooner than most; he never insisted that his newer songs were actually his best work. “I don’t know how I got to write those songs,” he admitted to Ed Bradley, of the classics he penned at his peak. “It’s a penetrating type of a magic, and I did it at one time.”

What’s left now, apart from the songs, is the distinctive voice, along with a repertoire of feints and dodges mixed with the occasional lip-curling hipster put-down. Onstage these days, the songwriter is often a gnomic shell, appearing to follow an internal logic by which he makes sense of himself to himself. Whatever those dialogues may be about, one suspects that the “real Bob Dylan” — whatever that means — of the singer’s youth was more sharper-edged and predatory than Timothée Chalamet’s cuddly, doe-eyed portrayal.

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Still, Chalamet gets the look and the gestures right. He also nicely conveys the capacity for menace that the self-made man inherently contains. After all, if a person invents themselves from scratch, discarding their flesh-and-blood parents and origins in favor of their own self-invented mythos, then how much is that person likely to care about you? Not much. In his portrayal, Chalamet is notably faithful to the first and greatest portrayal of the character of Bob Dylan on film, which was by Bob Dylan himself, in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back — which smartly allowed Dylan to do the work of explaining himself. By contrast, I’m Not There, an annoying film by the supremely surface-oriented director Todd Haynes, a master of a colder type of irony, swallows the Dylan mythology whole, as some kind of sacrament of modern American selfhood — without understanding or explaining why that should be true, apart from the multiplicity and seeming discontinuities in the pop star’s character, which Haynes implies should each be respected individually, like a family of distinguished drag queens.

What Haynes misses, and Pennebaker viscerally understood — and Mangold clearly intimates, without wanting to emphasize it too strongly — is that Dylan, in both his music and his persona, found himself at the center of the great intergenerational battle of the Sixties over the American gospel of individualism. For Dylan, the young man from Hibbing, the self that he invented out of his own materials was at once an entirely personal creation and at the same time represented his connection to a shared vision of America. He was a distinctly American individualist, just as Whitman was, and most great American-born artists are.

The materials he chose to work from were coded in ways that the young Dylan didn’t entirely recognize, though. Woody Guthrie wasn’t just a great American songwriter who spoke and sang in his own half-invented popular. The way that the young Robert Zimmerman might have imagined him. He was also a member of the Communist Party, which had its own uses for Guthrie’s persona and his art. The same was true of the parents of Dylan’s Greenwich Village girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who Dylan credited with educating him about racial discrimination and labor politics and other subjects that the young singer-songwriter professed to “not know much about.” While the great folk archivist Alan Lomax, whose materials became Dylan’s, was not a Communist, he was undoubtedly a preservationist who saw folk music not as raw material to be mined and re-mixed by a future rock and roll Whitman, but the rightful property of the oppressed.

In other words, as Mangold does a good job of showing, the American Left, centered around the Communist Party, used folk music as a cultural banner, and as a political instrument — and they were right to feel that Bob Dylan had used them, and scorned them. Or to put it in a way more partial to Dylan, the young singer-songwriter took the folk tradition that they had co-opted in the service of their version of Cold War politics and put it back into the place it belonged, which was music. Dylan’s sin was never simply going electric. It was in putting art above politics.

In doing so, Dylan turned his back on the certainties of Leftist politics in order to more fully become what he wanted to be in the first place, which was himself. Aside from being a singer-songwriter, who that person was was entirely his own business. “I’m a song-and-dance man,” he once told a press conference at the height of the mania surrounding his decision to become a rock and roll artist and release “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Baby Blue” and “Visions of Johanna”, instead of additional helpings of Leadbelly covers. Neither Dylan nor the gathered reporters seemed able to disguise their glee at the proposition that he could simply make music, free of politics or the demands of being a prophet. “Elvis, I could easily see myself as him,” Dylan mused more than once. “But a prophet? Nah.”

It is only fair to Bob Dylan, the man, however self-made, to acknowledge how much the decision to break free from the heavily politicized aesthetics of the American Left, and the expectations and demands that came with it, must have cost him, both as a human being and as an artist. The assertion of the greater truth of his own art over the demands of the collective must have been, in many dimensions, a never-ending nightmare. Such was the price of the creative freedom that he sought and gained.

Was it worth it? For Dylan and for America, the answer is yes. Dylan’s legendary Basement Tapes with the Band, which surfaced as a lost corpus of songs from somewhere deep in the American imagination, continue to speak to us now, as much as his albums from his creative peak do. The fact that he maintained his place in the national imagination up through his 80s, speaks to a personal strength that is uniquely visible now, and makes it possible for his music to be heard by a new generation. In an era in which cookie-cutter Leftist politics similarly declares its pre-eminence over the aesthetic whims of mere artists, whose job is to bend the knee and crank out Shepherd Fairey-like propaganda in the interests of the Party, Dylan’s struggle again resonates.

Dylan himself would most likely have as little interest in being portrayed as a refusenik against the demands of proto-wokism as he would in continuing to sing worker’s protest songs. He was more interested in being Elvis. Yet, his example feels especially potent now for the obvious reason that we are once again living in an age when the threats to the integrity of the self, and to artistic expression, from both the Left and Right are very obviously real, and it takes real courage to say no.

Dylan’s triumph in that fight was total. No one has ever been cooler than Bob Dylan, and no one since Walt Whitman wrote better lyrics that encompassed more of the American spirit. The folkies who wanted Dylan to continue to play acoustic folk and demonstrate for CORE, and who saw albums like Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks as betrayals of the party line, are plainly ridiculous figures, even as their present-day kin are easy to spot.

For those who knew Dylan, and who in one way or another had reason to see themselves as his peers, Dylan continues to represent the highest mountain in their American songwriting. Jimmy Webb, the great American songwriter, told me once of meeting Dylan at a party, whereupon Dylan pulled out a guitar and played Jimmy his version of “Wichita Lineman”, a Jimmy Webb song that could have also perhaps have been written by Dylan. When he was done, he looked at Webb expectantly. “What, now I’m supposed to play you one of your songs?” Webb shot back.

It’s weird to think that at 83, Bob Dylan is as relevant as ever to the country that gave him the freedom to invent himself. But it’s plainly true. That’s because America remained his greatest inspiration, and the place in the mind where he was always most at home. As he explained it, obliquely, in a long poem he wrote upon the death of his hero:

“You can touch and twist
And turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You’ll find God in the church of your choice
You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital

And though it’s only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You’ll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown”

It really was as close to a religious experience as I’ve had without the use of psychedelics, and I don’t think I’ve ever entirely broken free of the spell of that moment. One of Whitman’s more ebullient contemporaries called Leaves of Grass “the Bible of America”, and that seems exactly right to me — it’s less a collection of poems and far more a religious text, a way of modelling the personality and giving full scope to one’s creativity and inner life.

More than I’m really comfortable admitting, I’ve tried to mould myself in the direction suggested by Whitman. To me that means, above all, a few things. It means treating the self as infinite: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” It means regarding the border between oneself and other consciousnesses as permeable: part of the thrill of Leaves of Grass is the whimsical way that Whitman slides into the consciousness of John Paul Jones, Davy Crockett, anybody at all really. And it means an abiding, non-negotiable sense of equality and respect towards all creation: “what is that you express in your eyes,” Whitman writes of oxen, “it seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”

Now that I have passed my Whitman year — “I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin” — I find myself reflecting a little more sombrely on Whitman’s vision and what it means for me. I also find myself asking the tough question — how did he do it? — since his achievement seems so simple and replicable, but no other writer that I’m aware of has ever hit quite the vibration that Whitman did. It’s a question that Whitman invites, and he is at his most teasing about it: “if you want me again look for me under your boot soles,” he writes at the conclusion of “Song of Myself”.

What we can rule out, in terms of explaining Whitman, is genius. I’ve recently read some of Whitman’s early poems, and they’re almost shocking in their banality – “Let glory diadem the mighty dead / Let monuments of brass and marble rise.” A recent cottage industry has emerged — although it might be one grad student who keeps finding all these lost Whitman works — that vastly increases our knowledge of Whitman’s early writing, but every one of these works is conspicuously lacking: none contain what Whitman called the “me myself”. And so when Ralph Waldo Emerson read the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, he wrote to Whitman of his surprise: “I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion.” And as Whitman biographer David S. Reynolds put it 150 years later: “A dull, imitative writer of conventional poetry and pedestrian prose in the 1840s emerged in 1855 as a marvellously innovative, experimental poet.”

There seem to be three tacks to explaining this transformation. The first is on the order of a personal epiphany, “attributed to… a mystical experience he supposedly had in the 1850s or a homosexual coming-out that allegedly liberated his imaginations”, as Reynolds writes before soberly concluding, “in the absence of reliable evidence, such explanations remain unsupported hypotheses”.

Part of what has always so stunned me about Whitman is that he managed to have the epiphanies he did without the aid of psychedelics, but on closer inspection, he, uh, actually might not have been so unaided in his visions. Calamus — the grass-like plant that plays such an important role in Whitman’s writing (a set of his poems is named after it) — turns out to possess psychoactive properties, which was known in Whitman’s time. And Whitman himself was aware of its powers. “It is a medicinal root,” he told his amanuensis in 1891, and in the same conversation appears to be aware of calamus’ ability to induce tripping. At present, calamus is rarely ingested, but looking for trip descriptions of it online, I came across the following:

“Although the effect is very subtle, my senses are more sharpened and my mind is clear… A desire to go outside and take a walk overwhelms me. I put on my shoes and walk naturally towards the forest. Here I enjoy little things that strike me: the beautiful rustling of the leaves, the wind playing with my hair, the smell of the moss. A very peaceful feeling descends over me like a blanket.”

It sounds somehow familiar.

The other piece of folklore about Whitman’s transformation involves his homosexuality, and here I have recourse to a better-documented myth about Whitman. In 1966, an intrepid researcher discovered a robust urban legend in the small Long Island town where a young Whitman had taught. Whitman had been denounced from the pulpit for pederasty, and tarred and feathered. Townspeople recalled that Whitman had “left under a cloud”, and the school would for decades after be locally referred to as the “Sodom School”.

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There are some documentary reasons to doubt the story, but Whitman historians, Reynolds included, take the possibility seriously. If it’s true, and Whitman had experienced public humiliation like that on account of his sexuality, a line like “I celebrate myself” — the opening line of “Song of Myself” — sounds very different. It’s as resilient as it is triumphant, like the light in the tunnel at the end of years of therapy — it comes across as a declaration of radical self-acceptance, overcoming his angry trauma-inflected writing of the 1840s, and speaking exuberantly, at the top of his lungs.

That reading of Whitman puts him in line with the human potential movement, with microdosers and psychoanalysis patients and health nuts. Part of the cache of recently rediscovered Whitman material reveals that he wrote a book-length article series called “Manly Health and Training”, basically a highly florid men’s magazine. Whitman’s longtime boyfriend would recall that “he was an athlete — great, great. I knew him to do wonderful lifting, running, walking”.

The Whitman I’m describing here feels surprisingly contemporary and close-to-home — get in touch with your sexuality, lift some weights, find a hemp shop that sells calamus and you too can write Leaves of Grass. The second tack on Whitman makes him a little more remote. That would be to link him with a particular moment in the development of American national consciousness. Whitman was maybe the most conspicuously patriotic of major poets and he explicitly linked his writing to the expansion of the United States. “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature,” he wrote in the preface to the Leaves of Grass. “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” We can understand this in two ways — one is that American English, in Whitman’s time, was a sort of fresh clay out of which a new literature could be moulded, much as Shakespeare in the 1590s or Pushkin in the 1820s had a sort of first-mover advantage with their respective literary languages. Or we can understand this as meaning that Whitman had a messianic vision distinctive to America — that American democracy and exuberance would produce what Whitman calls “a copious, sane, gigantic offspring”, a living poem replete with “perfect characters and perfect sociologies”.

It is this vision that, for us now, leaves a bitter aftertaste. Of all Whitman’s characterisations, “sane” is the hardest to apply to our particular moment of American history. Whitman did seem to anticipate that his idea of America might be overly optimistic. In the otherwise exuberant Democratic Vistas, he writes: “the United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time.” And it’s that tremendous failure that, in the year of our Whitman 170, I find myself grappling with — that America just failed to achieve its potential, never acquired a real maturity and then, eventually, lost its idealism. Whitman, in the closest he would get to standard-issue political critique, wrote: “the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me.”

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But it’s the third tack to understanding Whitman which actually may be the most relevant and direct lesson of Whitman’s. What Emerson called “the long foreground” of Whitman’s was mostly journalism and self-publishing. Whitman, who left school at age 11, trained as a printer’s devil. And, throughout his career, he was intimately tied (in a way that very few writers are) to the physical production of his own work. He worked as a typesetter for publications in New York, founded his own newspaper The Long Islander, and for two years was the editor of the well-known Brooklyn Eagle. What he mostly was, though, was a failure. The self-publishing didn’t earn much. His practical-minded brother George would lament that “he made nothing of his chance” during the “great boom in Brooklyn” in the 1850s. And Whitman, who seems to have been living rough as much by necessity as poetic persona, would in 1840 style himself as part of a “loafer kingdom”.

But it was Whitman’s outsiderness — combined with his willingness to take control over the means of production — that accounted for his literary miracle. High-brow American literature in Whitman’s time was awful, really awful — stale hand-me-downs of European prosody — and Whitman, too, struggled to break free of it. “I too, like all others, was born in the vesture of this false notion of literature,” he said late in life. But he did break free of it. He came across enough fresh influences — Martin Tupper, Emerson himself — that he was able to develop a more distinctively American sensibility, augmented with the language of the streets and a dash of the pulpy writing emerging from the nascent penny presses. And by 1855, he was able to take care of the publication of Leaves of Grass entirely by himself — writing parts of the famous preface directly onto the keys of the press in the print shop, and then handling his own advertising and distribution.

What Whitman was doing sounds, of course, very much like blogging or Substack — and I have no doubt that if he were alive today that’s exactly how he would be distributing his work. In an excitable mood, I wrote on my Substack recently that “what we’re really on the cusp of is a whole different way of being”, and what I meant was the capacity of the internet to eliminate gatekeepers and to open the way for the “new, superb democratic literature” that Whitman described. This statement of mine was met with some skepticism. If Emerson “rubbed his eyes a little” at Leaves of Grass, the Substacker Teddy Brown had to “close [his] eyes and rub [his] temples” at the sheer stupidity of what I was saying.

But I stand by it. In one of his more mysterious poems, “The Song of the Answerer”, Whitman describes a figure maybe a century or five centuries in the future who will be his poetic analogue. I had always taken the Answerer to be a kind of Messiah, a Mahdi of lyric poetry, who would provide the “answers” to the poetic questions that Whitman posed. But rereading the poem now, and meditating on the superhuman qualities of the Answerer it occurs to me that Whitman isn’t describing a person but a spirit. What it is is a profound sense of equality: of a mutual respect that extends from mechanics to soldiers to sailors to authors to artists to labourers to gentlemen to prostitutes to beggars to congressmen.

The exuberant, expansive, athletic America of Whitman’s era may be long gone — if it ever really existed — but the vision of the Answerer isn’t as remote as Whitman sometimes makes it seem. It is, simply, a democratic sensibility. To find it requires at the same time, paradoxically, immense humility and a nearly boundless confidence. As Whitman put it, “There was never any more inception than there is now,” and the vision of the Answerer requires little else than a reaching for it.

Kennedy, who is 69 years old, recently shared videos of himself lifting weights and doing press-ups shirtless. Alongside these, he pledged that should he become President, he will “restore America as the global example of health and well-being. Not through pills or syringes, but through character and self-discipline.”

The idea that physical and moral vigour go together is ancient. The first Olympic Games were held nearly three millennia ago, around 776BC, and many athletic-looking Greek statues survive to this day that vividly celebrate male physical beauty and strength as shorthand for good character.

This association persisted. In his 1855 poem “I Sing The Body Electric”, Walt Whitman celebrated human beauty as a fusion of character and embodiment, where flesh and gesture “are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul”. According to Whitman, the “well-made man” expresses his character in both body and movement — all of which offers a clue as to character.

But fusing beauty and value lands differently today. The modern progressive mainstream has set itself firmly against the idea that our bodies say anything moral. Kennedy’s videos prompted a flurry of accusations that in showing off his muscular torso, he’s mired in toxic masculinity, dog-whistling body fascism and eugenics, and implicitly promoting discrimination against disabled people. And – perhaps most damningly of all for someone who promotes natural health – that he’s faking it: of using unnatural means to pump his muscles when in reality he’s old and weak.

Kennedy has not responded to the rumours about steroid use. But the argument hits a live and divisive issue on the Right: biotech. A significant chunk of his support comes from a cluster of emerging popular movements whose common theme is resistance to “unnatural” biotech innovations. He was a prominent opponent of Covid vaccine mandates, one such innovation; other issues in the same cluster include medical gender transition, and artificial meat – all of which inspire strong opposition as unacceptable incursions of technology into our nature.

So we might ask: how can Kennedy advocate health and wellbeing via character and self-discipline, and show off his ripped physique to underline the point, if he attained that physique with the help of synthetic hormones? It’s a fair question. But the collective shrug from Kennedy supporters suggests that what was gleefully pointed out as an inconsistency — an advocate of “natural” health possibly using medical tech to attain that health — is not, in fact, seen as contradictory in the slightest.

We take the opposition between tech and nature for granted today — not least because we’ve spent two centuries using tech to escape the limits of nature, and told ourselves this was a story of moral progress. This forms the backdrop — among other things — to the women’s movement, a story that wouldn’t have been possible without a host of now near-invisible technologies that underwrite women’s relative autonomy.

Beyond this, it forms the backdrop to progressivism in general. It’s not just women who now seek to escape the idea that our bodies say something about us: it’s everyone. From the disability rights movement to “body positivity”, the driving idea is that any judgement or constraint imposed by our contingent physical form should be challenged. Perhaps the logical endpoint of this challenge has been gender medicine’s all-out resistance to embodied limits, a politics that’s centrally about “pills and syringes” as liberation.

This utopian drive to break the bounds of human nature, then, began in earnest with the industrial era. As the world modernised, technology and a Protestant work ethic were applied not just to escaping our limits, but also to resisting our waning strength as physical work became less important. With the freshly-minted Land of the Free roaring from agrarian colonial backwater into industrial superpower, new anxieties proliferated about health, vitality and masculinity. In response, a “muscular Christianity” emerged which framed manly fitness as an expression of religious devotion — and whose many legacies include the still wildly popular sport of American football.

But it wasn’t just the Christians. As industrialisation made life easier and people richer and freer, so this new wealth and leisure drove an explosion in social and cultural experimentation in how to live well. In this free-for-all, a dizzying array of health entrepreneurs flourished, offering “water cures”, physiology lectures, anti-masturbation campaigns, sanatoria, and diets and lifestyles of such experimental weirdness, they make our 21st-century keto diets, NoFap forums and jade yoni eggs look positively normie.

Even Walt Whitman contributed to this emerging culture. Just three years after “I Sing The Body Electric” was published, he wrote a 13-instalment guide to Manly Health and Training in a New York newspaper, under the pseudonym “Mose Velsor”. In it, he sets out the intimate link between physical fitness, moral virtue — and also personal efficacy and performance. Training doesn’t just deliver a “perfect physique” but also helps a man “exalt the intensity of his personal force” — a transformation that will, in turn, “attract to him attention, friendship and respect”.

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This mania for self-improvement tracked the wider transition in American culture, from largely agrarian to increasingly wealthy, entrepreneurial and technologically advanced. To succeed in this new era, the ambitious man had to grind. In other words, the fitness culture that emerged with modernity serves as a mirror of the machine age that spawned it: a “body electric” for the age of electrification, in which our physical forms become sites of industry-like labour and competition.

Today, we live in a biotech age, in which our flesh appears less in Whitmanesque terms — as union of body and soul — than as organs for donation; DNA for re-writing; a uterus for rent. We are raw material for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

With this new turn has come another round of dematerialisation. Work is not just de-sexed, but virtualised. Life is sedentary. Happiness, risk-free sex, even weight management or the appearance of the opposite sex can be obtained in a pill or syringe. There’s no pressing reason to attain any level of physical fitness, except personal desire. And on top of these disintegrating forces, the dominant culture has also set itself (at least overtly) to the dissolution of physiological norms.

And just as industrial technologies spawned egalitarian challenges to our limits, and also new cults of the body beautiful, so today’s biotech age of hormone-enhanced affirmation and “inclusive” body culture has also given rise to a countervailing one, of aggressive physical beauty. One influential aspect of this backlash is a Right-wing subculture of bodybuilding, whose proponents oppose the progressive war on human nature along every possible axis. In general, adherents embrace effortful self-improvement, vitality and individual excellence, while dismissing “body positivity” and egalitarianism of every kind. Centrally, the RWBBs embrace the link expressed so controversially by Kennedy between physical health and moral worth — especially what health implies about individual effort and discipline.

Perhaps the most influential figure in this movement is the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, whose Bronze Age Mindset decries egalitarianism as the attempt to abolish excellence and natural hierarchy in favour of meaningless “buglife”. His social media account abounds with “Handsome Thursday” images of honed male physiques, presented as aesthetic resistance to such levelling-down.

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Unlike the 19th-century “muscular Christians”, this 21st-century fitness subculture draws inspiration more from the Hellenistic ancients, especially their sculptures of athletes. This affinity is so closely held that when a historian recently suggested ancient Greek soldiers would have been lean and tough, rather than “ripped”, he was deluged with furious anons, who accused him of self-interestedly attempting to legitimise “dad bods” and emasculation, and undermine men’s aspiration to physical beauty and strength, and — implicitly — to the superior character such beauty and strength have classically been viewed as reflecting.

But when such aspirations are located — as in the contested Greek soldiers — somewhere in the distant past, before the world modernised, what hope does anyone have of holding on to it? Critics sometimes accuse the RWBBs of clinging to a type of masculinity that has simply been rendered obsolete by changing social conditions. And maybe there’s something to that idea. Even “I Sing The Body Electric” expresses a palpable sense of loss at disappearing physical cultures: Whitman eulogises an agrarian grandfather hunting, boating and fishing with his many sons and grandsons. Hale and tan, loved by all, overwhelmingly magnetic, he’s a compelling figure – and was written in an era when that version of America was already disappearing.

Today, much as in the 19th century, we’re embroiled both in a tech-enabled war on human nature and a defence of that nature that is also tech-enabled — not least in how extremely online it is. But one upshot of this entanglement is that it might not, after all, be such a gotcha for Robert F. Kennedy Jr to be using testosterone replacement therapy to pursue the body beautiful.

Right-wing body-builders and their fellow travellers may decry the use of synthetic hormones for anti-normative ends, such as “transgender” medical interventions for children. But there’s far more ambivalence where it comes to using biotech to enhance human beauty and performance. For example, there’s no clear consensus in this community on whether using anabolic steroids is OK. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if even those who criticise the use of tech to wage war on our nature might be less troubled about using tech to give nature a helping hand. After all, there’s no going back even to the 19th century, let alone the world of the hale, tanned farmers Whitman eulogises – or indeed of Greek hoplites. And, in theory at least, technology and desire can be turned to ends other than flattening every physical difference between individuals.

So perhaps this is the best we can hope for: diverting our “pills and syringes” from waging war on our nature, toward wielding them in support of human health and beauty. It’s a risky path, with many pitfalls. But with no obvious route back to a supposedly “natural” state, it may be that the only way out is through.