1984 Foreword (Whitman) Tom wanted to be a poet

[Michael Joseph]

Though writing in 1855, Whitman is essentially articulating a view of
America that is consonant with the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and early
Melville, a view characteristic more of Jacksonian America than of his own
melancholy time-which might be your point. Higham's famous essay "From
Boundlessness to Consolidation"  brilliantly describes the forces by which
the kind of expansively poetic vision of the pre 1850 period dissolves
into the later pedestrian, despiritualized, closed, stifling America (i.e.
the rise of social controllers, industrialization, urbanization, mass
immigration and the breakdown of ethnic homogeneity, ideological conflict,
etc.). Thanks for keying in this ethereal stuff. Although Higham's
searching for zeitgeists has fallen out of historical fashion, his
contrasting of humanitarianism with fatalism has a contemporary resonance.


Michael