Library of America presents LOA LIVE
Jun 13, 2026 · 1 hr 2 min · 11 segments
Walt Whitman’s outrage at American politics and politicians was surpassed only by his passionate faith in democracy’s future. Both his anger and his hope fire his visionary prose writings on…
Max RudinHost
Mark EdmundsonGuest
David BromwichGuest
Karen KarbienerGuest
To be very brief and obvious, the same thing struck me generally that have done before.
Whitman's optimism and at the same time his careful warnings against what he sees as the likely obstructions, restrictions, narrowing of mass society that's a feature of the time he's writing in, the beginning of the Gilded Age.
These have always struck me in reading Democratic Vistas, which is the main text in this book.
selection from Whitman's political writing, all I can say is it struck me much more now because we're living through some of the worst dangers he anticipated.
I guess just thinking really immediately of what I'm doing, I've been traveling in the north of England and democratic vistas really did not do well when Whitman released it in 1871 in the US.
But in the north, in Manchester, in Bolton, where he had a stalwart support group starting in the later 1880s, they republished this work, they spread the word on it.
So I guess I'm struck this time again about the deaf ear that Americans had for this document in the first place.
So, yeah, just using the fan base I'm looking at here and how much they have really, really loved Whitman for even longer than even the US has.
This feeling that this is a new project in the world and that it is always... potentially going to fail, but the hopes for success are so great and so wonderful in the possibilities for thriving that they offer to everyday men and women that it's worth throwing yourself in and fighting for it.
David's remark about some of the exasperation Whitman feels is well taken, but this is the exasperation of a lover who is just mad about this particular form of human connection.
And one way I like to think about Walt is that, you know, there's the Declaration of Independence, there's the Constitution, and those are all fine documents.
But what we did not have was a document or some form of art that showed us what it felt like to be a man or a woman in a democratic society day to day.
And that's what he adds in the poetry and also sometimes in the prose, the emotional connection between people that he so treasured and that was made possible by this democratic invention.
To be very brief and obvious, the same thing struck me generally that have done before.
Whitman's optimism and at the same time his careful warnings against what he sees as the likely obstructions, restrictions, narrowing of mass society that's a feature of the time he's writing in, the beginning of the Gilded Age.
These have always struck me in reading Democratic Vistas, which is the main text in this book.
selection from Whitman's political writing, all I can say is it struck me much more now because we're living through some of the worst dangers he anticipated.
I guess just thinking really immediately of what I'm doing, I've been traveling in the north of England and democratic vistas really did not do well when Whitman released it in 1871 in the US.
But in the north, in Manchester, in Bolton, where he had a stalwart support group starting in the later 1880s, they republished this work, they spread the word on it.
So I guess I'm struck this time again about the deaf ear that Americans had for this document in the first place.
So, yeah, just using the fan base I'm looking at here and how much they have really, really loved Whitman for even longer than even the US has.
This feeling that this is a new project in the world and that it is always... potentially going to fail, but the hopes for success are so great and so wonderful in the possibilities for thriving that they offer to everyday men and women that it's worth throwing yourself in and fighting for it.
David's remark about some of the exasperation Whitman feels is well taken, but this is the exasperation of a lover who is just mad about this particular form of human connection.
And one way I like to think about Walt is that, you know, there's the Declaration of Independence, there's the Constitution, and those are all fine documents.
But what we did not have was a document or some form of art that showed us what it felt like to be a man or a woman in a democratic society day to day.
And that's what he adds in the poetry and also sometimes in the prose, the emotional connection between people that he so treasured and that was made possible by this democratic invention.
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