Democratic Vistas Author:Walt Whitman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A BACKWARD GLANCE ON MY OWN ROAD. IT is probably best at once to give warning, (even more specific than in the head-line,) that the following paragraphs have... more » my ' Leaves of Grass,' and some of its reasons and aims, for their radiating centre. Altogether, the)Tform a backward glimpse along my own road and journey the last thirty years. Many consider the expression of poetry and art to come under certain inflexible standards, set patterns, fixed and immovable, like iron castings. Really, nothing of the sort. As, in the theatre of to-day, ' each new actor of real merit (for Hamlet or any eminent role) recreates the persons of the older drama, sending traditions to the winds, and producing a new character on the stage,' the adap'ation, development, incarnation, of his own traits, idiosyncrasy, and environment—' there being not merely one good way of representing a great part, but as many ways as there are great actors '—so in constructing poems. Another illustration would be thaTloFdelineating purposes, the melange of existence is but an eternal font of type, and may be set up to any text, however different—with room and welcome, at whatever time, for new compositors. I should say real American poetry—nay, within any highsense, American literature—is something yet .to.-be. So far, the aims and stress of the book-making business here—the miscellaneous and fashionable parts of it, the majority— seem entirely adjusted (like American society life,) to certain fine-drawn, surface, imported ways and examples, having no deep root or hold in our soil. I hardly know a volume emanating American nativity, manliness, from its centre. It is true, the numberless issues of our day and land (the leading monthlies are the best,) as they continue feeding the insatiable public appetite, convey...« less