Walt Whitman has long been considered one of the great poets of modern democracy. The focus on Whitman's democratic poetry and prose, however, has obscured his deeper purpose, to explicate the "fathomless" person who stands as the reason for and justification of democracy. This dissertation seeks to remedy this misperception in the understanding of Whitman's political thought by exploring his "personalism." The poet coined the term for American English not as a synonym for individualism or egoism, but as an attempt to evoke the person as a whole, in all of their spiritual, material, relational, historical, and national complexity. Yet this means that such persons can never be captured in words; they remain elusive. Absent, even as they are present, universal categories fail to contain them.

Modern democratic regimes are the first to acknowledge this feature of all persons, to take their uniqueness, their "limitlessness" and "inevitability" seriously. Other forms of political life held that only a few could develop, explore, and act out of their inner depth, but democracies aspire to this realization in all persons. Whitman's idea of democracy was one drawn from several strands, especially the Radical Enlightenment and the Anglo-American republican tradition. The poet, however, was not satisfied with their impersonal focus on laws, institutions, and progress. Because of this, he also incorporated two currents that opposed these impersonal tendencies by engendering a new appreciation for the person: Romanticism and German Idealism. This theoretical background is combined with an attention to the details of life as lived by democratic citizens, evoking persons in all of their inner complexity and outer activity.

Whitman's poetry thus makes an important contribution to liberal democratic political thought in the way that it explores the theoretical meaning of personhood in the reality of daily democratic life. Understanding this personalist perspective shows that his democratic poetry is more than an artistic exercise to aesthetically connect citizens to each other and to democracy. Rather, poetry is the only linguistic tool capable of explicating democracy's deepest intuition of what it means to be a person.