Essay Questions

What purpose for this work of prose does Whitman outline for himself?

Whitman gives insight into the reasoning behind taking up his pen and writing down his thoughts not in verse, but prose quite early. Ambiguity on motivation is thrown completely out the window at the moment he writes

“To him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between democracy's convictions, aspirations, and the people's crudeness, vice, caprices, I mainly write this essay.”

He also asserts that admitting the dangers facing democracy from its very standard bearers—the citizens of the America—and facing them squarely and honestly is a primary rationale. Whitman turns out to not just blowing smoke as he does confront the dangers facing American democracy. He also does not shy away from placing blame and naming names to identify those sections of the public upon which the crumbling of its moral foundation in the post-war years lies.

What quality does Whitman identify as the most necessary to repair the damage wrought in the post-war years and upon whom does he confer the responsibility?

Whitman first outlines the problem facing the country, which is that democracy cannot be expected re-energize organically as a result of politics and government. A strain of belief and support must go deeper than process and system because the one quality that is “most needed” to stop the fragmentation and discord threatening American democracy is a “moral identity.” It is the poets, artists and lecturers that will rise in the wake of the moral decay and disintegration of values that Whitman charges the responsibility. Just a few original examples of these messengers of moral identity can do more to hold democracy together than “all its Constitutions, legislative and judicial ties, and all its hitherto political, warlike, or materialistic experiences.”

Whitman uses the term “personalism” around ten times throughout the text. What does he mean by this term?

While the bulk of Democratic Vistas is outward-directed toward the factions of society which have brought on it’s the decay of its moral identity, it should come as no surprise that the author of “Song of Myself” would eventually come around to the concept of individualism. Unique individualism is what Whitman means by personalism. While most of the text is obsessively devoted to the techniques of prose, there is one passage directly related to identifying the meaning of personalism in which one can almost palpably feel the spirit of Whitman the poet struggling to break through:

“There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity -- yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me…Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf in the fable, once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven.”