Walt Whitman was born in 1819 in West Hills, New York. He is considered as one of America’s most influential poets. He founded his own newspaper, wrote for it and edited others, he was against slavery, and worked in an army hospital during the Civil War.
Walt Whitman wrote Democratic Vistas due to the rapid change in the political life in the United States.
Before talking about Whitman’s Democratic Vistas we have to know that he wrote it after six years of the Civil War, America was divided and there was lots of political and social issues at that time, so he wanted to make something to unite his nation.
In Democratic vistas, he blamed the segregation between people based on race, color & gender as this kind of segregation played a huge role in the civil war.
“I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences. It is curious to me that while so many voices, pens, minds, in the press, lecture-rooms, in our Congress, &c., are discussing intellectual topics, pecuniary dangers, legislative problems, the suffrage, tariff and labor questions, and the various business and benevolent needs of America, with propositions, remedies, often worth deep attention, there is one need, a hiatus the profoundest, that no eye seems to perceive, no voice to state. Our fundamental want to-day in the United States, with closest, amplest reference to present conditions, and to the future, is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatures, far different, far higher in grade than any yet known”
Whitman here talked about democracy and how it can only be achieved through shaping its own forms of art, learning & literature. America has minds and pens thinking and writing about intellectual topics, passing laws and the right to vote; however, these issues are being discussed in the press, lecture-rooms & in the Congress. Whitman wants all the Americans to be involved in order to make their present better and to shape their future.
“The problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The priest departs, the divine literature comes. Never was anything more wanted than, to-day, and here in the States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the great literature of the modern. At all times, perhaps, the central point in any nation, and that whence it is itself really sway’d the most, and whence it sways others, is its national literature, especially its archetypal poems. Above all previous lands, a great original literature is surely to become the justification and reliance, (in some respects the sole reliance) of American democracy.”
In this quote, Whitman talks about the importance of literature and poems. He is saying that humanity’s problem in the civilized world is social & religious.
Moreover, Whitman wanted America to have a generation of artists and poets so they can have a distinctive literature and culture different than the ones in Europe.
According to Whitman, democracy in America can only be accomplished with the excessive amount of poems and literature that is being presented to the public and how the public reacts to those forms of art, this is when they can develop their ideas and make informed choices about democracy.
Third World Democracy 