Democratic Vistas: 1860-1880

by Alan Trachtenberg (Compiler)

This lengthy prose work, published in an eighty-four-page pamphlet in 1871, is comprised of a trilogy of essays Walt Whitman originally intended for publication in the Galaxy magazine. Two appeared in the "Democracy" in December 1867 and "Personalism" in May 1868; he submitted the third, "Orbic Literature," to the Galaxy, but it did not appear. The text of Democratic Vistas, which Whitman variously described as "memoranda" and "speculations," some of which date to the middle 1850s, shows evidence of Whitman’s familiar propensity to tinker. Textual variations are evident in its several versions—from the "Rough Draft," Galaxy, pamphlet, and Two Rivulets (1876) versions to the Specimen Days & Collect version. The various additions and deletions, however, are minor and do not alter Whitman’s purpose. The immediate impulse for the writing of Democratic Vistas was the publication, in Horace Greeley’s Tribune on 16 August 1867, of the complete text of Thomas Carlyle’s Shooting And After?, a blistering critique of democratizing trends, specifically enfranchisement legislation, in England and America. Carlyle’s and Whitman’s essays belong to a larger body of writings that appeared during the third quarter of the nineteenth century and attempted to address the spectacle of a putative moral and spiritual collapse. Unable to discern the providential arm operating through engineering marvels, a frenzied economic development, vulgar consumerism, and widespread social fragmentation, writers in this country and England attempted to re-center the concept of culture, conceiving of it as a beneficent instrument of political reconstruction.--Arthur Wrobel

386 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Alan Trachtenberg was Neil Gray, Jr., Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University.