Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My FancyWhitman, Walt
History
Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy
Whitman, Walt
American literature
Admitting all this, with the priceless value of our political
institutions, general suffrage, (and fully acknowledging the latest,
widest opening of the doors,) I say that, far deeper than these, what
finally and only is to make of our western world a nationality superior
to any hither known, and out-topping the past, must be vigorous,
yet unsuspected Literatures, perfect personalities and sociologies,
original, transcendental, and expressing (what, in highest sense, are
not yet express'd at all,) democracy and the modern. With these, and
out of these, I promulge new races of Teachers, and of perfect Women,
indispensable to endow the birth-stock of a New World. For feudalism,
caste, the ecclesiastic traditions, though palpably retreating from
political institutions, still hold essentially, by their spirit, even in
this country, entire possession of the more important fields, indeed the
very subsoil, of education, and of social standards and literature.
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, literatuses, far
different, far higher in grade than any yet known, sacerdotal, modern,
fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of
American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of
life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than the popular
superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections
of Presidents or Congresses--radiating, begetting appropriate teachers,
schools, manners, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing, (what
neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto
accomplish'd, and without which this nation will no more stand,
permanently, soundly, than a house will stand without a substratum,) a
religious and moral character beneath the political and productive
and intellectual bases of the States. For know you not, dear, earnest
reader, that the people of our land may all read and write, and may
all possess the right to vote--and yet the main things may be entirely
lacking?--(and this to suggest them.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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