Mark Ford writes:

Whitman’s racial politics have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. They were the subject of a superb essay by Ed Folsom called ‘Lucifer and Ethiopia’ that was published in the collection A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman (edited by David Reynolds), and they also feature in Folsom’s excellent introduction to this facsimile edition of the first book publication of Democratic Vistas. Spurred into prose by Carlyle’s taunts and barbs, Whitman set himself the task of composing three essays that would defend America and democracy, indeed would use, as he puts it in the first essay, ‘America and Democracy as convertible terms’. The poetry he had written up to this point, and which he was sure would eventually lead to his being absorbed by his country as affectionately as he had absorbed it, had been inspired by the same nationalist ideal, but the unbounded faith and hope of the early editions of Leaves of Grass had somewhat curdled by 1867, as he confronted, and promised not to ‘gloss over’, ‘the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States’. Still, the three essays, ‘Democracy’, ‘Personalism’ and ‘Orbic Literature’, were intended not only to outline the challenges facing the democratic ideal in the new era, but to propose a solution: the creation of a literary culture commensurate with the new nation’s achievements and potential.

(LRB 17 March 2011)

Iowa | hardback |ISBN: 9781587298707