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Walt Whitman: On Democracy (paperback)

Introduction by David Bromwich More

Few writers have condemned America’s moral failures as harshly as Walt Whitman. But for all his fury over the nation’s “canker’d” political institutions (“saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration . . . [even] the judiciary is tainted”) and its mania for commerce (“the demonism of greed”), he preserves a passionate faith in its democratic, egalitarian ideals and […]

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Few writers have condemned America’s moral failures as harshly as Walt Whitman. But for all his fury over the nation’s “canker’d” political institutions (“saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration . . . [even] the judiciary is tainted”) and its mania for commerce (“the demonism of greed”), he preserves a passionate faith in its democratic, egalitarian ideals and in the “simple separate person.” This faith, a source of hope, deepens and enlivens his essential prose writings on democracy, gathered here for the first time. Together they reveal the force of his attachment to the idea of equality, and speak urgently to us today.

“The Eighteenth Presidency!,” a scorching unpublished screed written during the presidential election of 1856, registers Whitman’s growing anger at the inability of the contesting parties to meet the constitutional crises confronting the nation. In Democratic Vistas, Whitman assumes the mantle of the poet-prophet of a better America and articulates his notion of American “personalism”—a kind of individual identity that blends the one and the many into a deeper commonality. The short essay “Origins of Attempted Secession” and vivid extracts from the autobiographical Specimen Days find Whitman interpreting the headlong rush to civil war and his own firsthand experience of its heavy toll within the framework of America’s larger democratic aspirations.

In his introduction, acclaimed political commentator David Bromwich reflects on Whitman’s political prose writings and why they remain vital and fresh.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was born on Long Island and educated in Brooklyn, New York. He served as a printer’s devil, journeyman compositor, itinerant schoolteacher, editor, and unofficial nurse to Northern and Southern soldiers during the Civil War and is widely considered the greatest American poet of the nineteenth century.

David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. His books include The Intellectual Career of Edmund Burke and American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us. His articles on contemporary politics and the fate of civil liberties in the United States have appeared in Dissent, The Nation, HuffPost, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books.

The paperback edition features French flaps and has been printed on acid-free paper.
Table of Contents

Introduction by David Bromwich

The Eighteenth Presidency!

Democratic Vistas

Origins of Attempted Secession

from Specimen Days
Opening of the Secession War
National Uprising and Volunteering
Contemptuous Feeling
Abraham Lincoln
The Inauguration
Death of President Lincoln
Calhoun’s Real Monument
The Real War Will Never Get in the Books
Upon Our Own Land

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-846-5 210 pages

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