Democratic Vistas
Democratic Vistas is a book by the American author Walt Whitman, published in 1871. It is considered an early classic work of comparative politics and letters. Whitman, who was then working as a federal clerk, does much to expound on the influence of the Louisiana Purchase and expansion on the American spirit, character, and body politic (foreshadowing Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis). He also criticizes Thomas Carlyle's Shooting Niagara: and after? and other literary works and comments on the Industrial Revolution and the predecessors of Modernism, which chose restraint and rationality above emotion and feelings.
Whitman condemns the corruption and greed of the Gilded Age, denouncing the post-Civil War materialism that had overtaken the country. “Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us,” he writes. His solution to the moral crisis is literature: "Two or three really original American poets...would give more compaction and more moral identity, (the quality to-day most needed) to these States, than all its Constitutions, legislative and judicial ties,” he declares, believing that literature would unite the country.[1]
References
- ^ Peck, Garrett (2015). Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America's Great Poet. Charleston, SC: The History Press. p. 150. ISBN 978-1626199736.
- Whitman, Walt (1871). "Democratic Vistas". University of Virginia. Retrieved 9 June 2011.
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(1855–1892)
- "Come Up from the Fields Father" (1865)
- "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" (1855)
- "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day" (1865)
- "I Sing the Body Electric" (1855)
- "A Noiseless Patient Spider" (1891)
- "O Captain! My Captain!" (1865)
- "One Hour to Madness and Joy" (1860)
- "One's Self I Sing" (1867)
- "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" (1859)
- "Patrolling Barnegat" (1856)
- "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" (1865)
- "Prayer of Columbus" (1900)
- "The Sleepers" (1855)
- "Song of Myself" (1855)
- "Song of the Open Road" (1856)
- "This Dust Was Once the Man" (1871)
- "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1865)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/91/Walt_Whitman_by_a_Roycrofter.jpg/100px-Walt_Whitman_by_a_Roycrofter.jpg)
- List of poems
- Franklin Evans (1842)
- Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852)
- Democratic Vistas (1871)
- Passage to India (1871)
- Elegiac Ode (1884)
- Sea Drift (1906)
- A Sea Symphony (1909)
- Ode to Death (1919)
- Morning Heroes (1930)
- Sea Drift (1933)
- Dona nobis pacem (1936)
- Secular Cantata No. 2: A Free Song (1942)
- When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1946)
- The Wound-Dresser (1989)
- Lilacs (1996)
- Symphony No. 2 (1999)
- Dooryard Bloom (2004)
honoraria
- Walt Whitman Award
- Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln
- Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site
- Walt Whitman House
- The Long Islander
- Walt Whitman Bridge
- Walt Whitman (Davidson)
- Walt Whitman High School (Maryland)
- Walt Whitman High School (New York)
- Walt Whitman Shops
- Whitman-Walker Health