Sensing Democracy Across the Waters: Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and the Lyric Redistribution of the Sensible

초록

This article reads Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” as a lyric event that performs what Jacques Rancière calls a redistribution of the sensible. In the poem, the ferry, river, sunset, crowd, and future reader constitute a perceptual field in which the boundaries of visibility, audibility, and participation are reconfigured. Whitman’s repeated structures of address—especially the parallel syntax of “Just as you, so I” and the refrain “I too”—disrupt the hierarchy between poetic speaker and future reader, creating a scene of embodied equality among anonymous persons separated by time. This equality, however, is not secured at the level of institutions, legal rights, or political programs. It is provisionally verified within lyric form through shared perception, bodily experience, moral opacity, and transhistorical address. The article therefore argues that “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” makes democracy sensible by staging a common perceptual world where strangers meet.

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