Walt Whitman: Democratic Vistas

In the 1844 essay, “The Poet,”a rich assemblage of Platonic idealism applied to the art of the written word, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “We do not with sufficient plainness or sufficient profoundness address ourselves to life . . . We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer . . . Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.” (281). He may have penned these thoughts prophetically in the anticipation of a writer such as Walt Whitman. However, almost three decades and a civil war after Emerson’s clarion call, Whitman, himself, repeats the necessity of finding a true American literary voice in his piece “Democratic Vistas,” even to the point of proclaiming, in a less obfuscating manner than Emerson, that “America has yet morally or artistically originated nothing” (21).

To this end, Whitman’s essay continues the Platonic theme of Forms – as well as the Hegelian transcription of them found in Emerson – combined with a Marxist sense of universality and inevitability. He argues that the best literature can “touch a man . . . in their expression through autochthonic lights and shades, flavors, fondnesses, aversions, specific incidents, illustrations, out of his own nationality, geography, surroundings, antecedents, &c. The spirit and the form are one, and depend far more on association, identity and place, than is supposed” (32). A native literature, seemingly spawned by the land itself, will be more satisfying and universally accepted than contemporary or past European works. The Poet, according to Whitman, must be attuned to abstract thoughts that do not necessarily originate in sensible world.

Whitman stresses the requisite universality of this new American literature from the onset describing the country as containing “a large variety of character” (1) an image that is reinforced throughout “Vistas.” Whitman is fond of listing items seemingly to make himself all-inclusive. For example, in a passage that conflates geography, technology and humanity, Whitman, writing on the origination of true “American poetic expression,” proclaims it:

. . . lies sleeping far away, happily unrecognized and uninjur'd by the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and critics of the saloons, or the lecturers in the colleges -- lies sleeping, aside, unrecking itself, in some western idiom, or native Michigan or Tennessee repartee, or stump-speech -- or in Kentucky or Georgia, or the Carolinas -- or in some slang or local song or allusion of the Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia or Baltimore mechanic -- or up in the Maine woods -- or off in the hut of the California miner, or crossing the Rocky mountains, or along the Pacific railroad -- or on the breasts of the young farmers of the northwest, or Canada, or boatmen of the lakes. (33)

Furthermore, he makes a demand for “a programme [sic] of culture, drawn out, not for a single class alone, or for the parlors or lecture-rooms, but with an eye to practical life, the west, the working-men, the facts of farms and jack-planes and engineers, and of the broad range of the women also of the middle and working strata” (22).

Unification of American consciousness coupled with the maturation of democratic ideals is not only required, he argues, but inevitable. In one of the more Marxist passages of “Vistas,” Whitman contends that, “much trouble might well be saved to all European lands by recognizing this palpable fact, (for a palpable fact it is,) that some form of such democratizing is about the only resource now left. That, or chronic dissatisfaction continued, mutterings which grow annually louder and louder, till, in due course, and pretty swiftly in most cases, the inevitable crisis, crash, dynastic ruin.” He adds that American democracy is leading towards “a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort -- a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth” that will promote the physical, financial, and intellectual security of “the aggregate of its middling property owners” (14).

Written after the Civil War and Whitman’s experiences in field hospitals surveying the carnage wrought by that conflict, “Vistas” is an attempt to discover the most effective means to provide “a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the States” (3). In essence, Whitman, much like Emerson before him, is looking to the Poet to provide a unifying force that can not only bring the country together and help it to heal, but also to allow the battle tested democracy to come to full fruition. As he describes it in “Vistas,” a democracy is an intricate balancing act between the individual and “the aggregate.” To serve both, the Poet, and his works, must also be an individual formed from the universal.