The Walt Whitman Archive
Complete Prose Works
The problems of the achievements of this crowning stage through future first-class National Singers, Orators, Artists, and others—of creating in literature an imaginative New World, the correspondent and counterpart of the current Scientific and Political New Worlds,—and the perhaps distant, but still delightful prospect, (for our children, if not in our own day,) of delivering America, and, indeed, all Christian lands everywhere, from the thin moribund and watery, but appallingly extensive nuisance of conventional poetry—by putting something really alive and substantial in its place—I have undertaken to grapple with, and argue, in the preceding "Democratic Vistas."