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
Their politics the United States have, in my opinion, with all their
faults, already substantially establish'd, for good, on their own
native, sound, long-vista'd principles, never to be overturn'd, offering
a sure basis for all the rest. With that, their future religious forms
sociology, literature, teachers, schools, costumes, &c., are of course
to make a compact whole, uniform, on tallying principles. For how can
we remain, divided, contradicting ourselves, this way?[28] I say we can
only attain harmony and stability by consulting ensemble and the ethic
purports, and faithfully building upon them. For the New World, indeed,
after two grand stages of preparation-strata, I perceive that now a
third stage, being ready for, (and without which the other two were
useless,) with unmistakable signs appears. The First stage was the
planning and putting on record the political foundation rights of
immense masses of people--indeed all people--in the organization of
republican National, State, and municipal governments, all constructed
with reference to each, and each to all. This is the American programme,
not for classes, but for universal man, and is embodied in the compacts
of the Declaration of Independence, and, as it began and has now
grown, with its amendments, the Federal Constitution--and in the State
governments, with all their interiors, and with general suffrage; those
having the sense not only of what is in themselves, but that their
certain several things started, planted, hundreds of others in the same
direction duly arise and follow. The Second stage relates to material
prosperity, wealth, produce, labor-saving machines, iron, cotton, local,
State and continental railways, intercommunication and trade with all
lands, steamships, mining, general employment, organization of great
cities, cheap appliances for comfort, numberless technical schools,
books, newspapers, a currency for money circulation, &c. The
Third stage, rising out of the previous ones, to make them and
all illustrious, I, now, for one, promulge, announcing a native
expression-spirit, getting into form, adult, and through mentality, for
these States, self-contain'd, different from others, more expansive,
more rich and free, to be evidenced by original authors and poets
to come, by American personalities, plenty of them, male and female,
traversing the States, none excepted--and by native superber
tableaux and growths of language, songs, operas, orations, lectures,
architecture--and by a sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly
taking command, dissolving the old, sloughing off surfaces, and from
its own interior and vital principles, reconstructing, democratizing
society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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