Superb blasphemy: Jonathan Wooding asks whether Walt Whitman’s poetry is the counterpoint to Quaker stillness

‘Here is that anarchic voice feared by authoritarians and conformists.’

by Jonathan Wooding 3rd July 2026

If John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), were to have had a good experience of his contemporaries, the Quakers, might he not have included an allegorical figure of Quakerism in his great prose-poem of spiritual journeying? Never mind Evangelist, Faithful, Mr Sagacity and even Mrs Light-Mind, we might have had Friend Inward-Light, speaking in elevated tones of freedom, equality, courage and peace (and the dangers of complacency and respectable piety, of course). If Bunyan’s wayfaring Christian had met Friend Inward-Light midway on his hair-raising pilgrimage and asked her the Way – well, what if she’d sounded like this:

I speak the pass-word primeval… I give the sign of
      democracy;

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their
      counterpart of on the same terms.