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James Turner's Wikipedia article for ENGL2131.01 Democratic Vistas

Analysis of Article

The introduction could be improved, but also there is no analysis and nothing else other than the introductory paragraph. There is only one source that the previous author used. There is much that could be improved. This article is about Walt Whitman's essay Democratic Vistas, and the changes he felt needed to take place in America. The entire Wikipedia article consists only of two small paragraphs, therefore it could be improved a great deal. The initial paragraph is lacking citation and this will be added in the revision.

Reading List

A numbered list of all your readings go here. Use the following format:

• Stovall, Floyd. (1961). Prose Works 1892, Volume II.
• Erkkila, Betsy. (1989). Whitman the Political Poet.
• Wrobel, Arthur. (1998). Walt Whitman An Encylcopedia.
• The Norton Anthology American Literature (2012).
• Encyclopedia Brittanica

Revised paragraph from article

Original

Democratic Vistas is a major work of comparative politics and letters published by the American poet and author Walt Whitman in 1871, who was then working as a federal clerk. Whitman does much to expound on the influence of the Louisiana Purchase and expansion on the American spirit, character, and body politic (foreshadowing Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis). In it, he criticizes Thomas Carlyle's Shooting Niagara: and after? and other literary works. It also comments on the Industrial Revolution and the predecessors of Modernism, which chose restraint and rationality above emotion and feelings.

Whitman condemned the corruption and greed of the Gilded Age, denouncing the post-Civil War materialism that had overtaken the country. “Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us,” he wrote. His solution to the moral crisis was literature: "Two or three really original American poets...would give more compaction and more moral identity, (the quality to-day most needed) to these States, than all its Constitutions, legislative and judicial ties,” he declared, believing that literature would unite the country.^[1]

Revised

Democratic Vistas is a major work of comparative politics and letters published by the American poet and author Walt Whitman in 1871, who was then working as a federal clerk. Whitman does much to expound on the influence of the Louisiana Purchase and expansion on the American spirit, character, and body politic (foreshadowing Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis). In his essay, he criticizes Thomas Carlyle's Shooting Niagara: and after? and other literary works. It also comments on the Industrial Revolution and the predecessors of Modernism, which chose restraint and rationality above emotion and feelings.

Whitman condemned the corruption and greed of the Gilded Age, denouncing the post-Civil War materialism that had overtaken the country. “Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us,” he wrote. His solution to the moral crisis was literature: "Two or three really original American poets...would give more compaction and more moral identity, (the quality to-day most needed) to these States, than all its Constitutions, legislative and judicial ties,” he declared, believing that literature would unite the country.^[1]

Original Contribution

Floyd Stevall states, "In Democratic Vistas, Whitman allowed extra spacing between paragraph at irregular intervals." This is a fact that many may not be aware of. In the book Whitman the Political Poet, the author Betsy Erkkila states, "There is a rather tragic irony in the fact that the democratic poet of bodily health and free-wheeling mobility should become in his later years a 'half-paralytic'. And yet there had always been a curious correspondence between Whitman's body and the body politic of America" Democratic Vistas was originally intended to be published in Galaxy magazine. Arthur Wrobel states, "Whitman's prose style in Democratic Vistas has been justly described as diffuse, tortured, and murky—one that seemingly dramatizes Whitman in his role as poet-prophet speaking out of a visionary trance." He is known for his poetry, but he also published essays in 1867 and 1868 numbers of the New York periodical Galaxy, as stated above, which he expanded into Democratic Vistas (1870), a book conveying his sometimes sharply condemnatory appraisal of postwar democratic culture. There is an obvious contradiction here, as the original paragraph of this article states 1871 as the publication date stated by Arthur Wrobel and The Norton Anthology on American Literature states 1870. Democratic Vistas was written after the American Civil War and Whitman suggests that some notion of heroism and honour had been lost by Americans.

Notes

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