Walt Whitman New York: J.S. Redfield, 1871. Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.

Whitman was one of the few writers to keep the Emersonian faith in individual and cultural regeneration after the Civil War. How difficult that was can best be appreciated by reading Democratic Vistas, a prose work he published to protest the greed, corruption and spiritual failure of what, two years later, Mark Twain would label "The Gilded Age." In 1855 Whitman celebrated the United States as "essentially the greatest poem." In 1871 he admits that he must look to the future, must write "upon things that exist not, and travel by maps yet unmade" in order to see that newer world of consciousness. "But," he adds, "the throes of birth are upon us." Almost one hundred years later, at the end of Armies of The Night, Norman Mailer's account of the March on the Pentagon, America is still in labor: "America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, [is] now a beauty with leprous skin. She is heavy with child...she will probably give birth, and to what?...can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl deliver a babe of the new world brave and tender, artful and wild?"

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