Literature and the Authority of Technology

Abstract

Whitman, who is the starting point for modern American literature in so many ways, took it upon himself in Democratic Vistas (1871) to define the character of American culture in a way that has had continuing relevance throughout the twentieth century: “America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past”. Starting with the close observation of nature, the poet works by analogies, by indirections; his genius lies in the “image-making faculty, coping with material creation, and rivaling, almost triumphing over it” (pp. 503 and 510). Thus, as Whitman describes it, the poet or artist is making a kind of facsimile world, a world that rivals the creation, and indeed — in a curious phrase — almost triumphs over it; inspired by “science or the modern”, Whitman posits an analogy between artistic creation and the technological process that situates him at a particular juncture in American culture, the beginning of the modern vision.