"Song of the Open Road"-one attempt to create such a vision-affirms his faith that the (somewhat vague) "goal that was named cannot be countermanded" (section 14). In Democratic Vistas he contends that the attainment of personal and societal betterment must be preceded by a powerful poetic vision of the future. Whitman translates the nineteenth-century doctrine of progress into a vision of a hard-fought but inevitable individual advancement-"the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe" (section 13). It has remained popular because its insights into human frailty are offset by its rousing call to freedom and fraternity, by its dynamic persona who is at once the poem's subject and the spokesman for Whitman's exuberant gospel of hope, and by its stirring musicality.ĭuring the 1850s the open road was a distinctively American symbol of progress-an imagined escape route toward the quasi-mythical open spaces where one was free to prosper, to commune with nature, to discover one's selfhood, and to undergo spiritual regeneration. a religious poem in the truest and best sense of the term" ( Autograph Revision 88–89). There it is called "a mystic and indirect chant of aspiration toward a noble life, a vehement demand to reach the very highest point that the human soul is capable of attaining. Whitman's own interpretation of the work is most nearly expressed in a book on which he collaborated. Originally published as "Poem of The Road," the poem received its present imaginative title in 1867 in 1881 its 224 lines were divided into fifteen sections. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), reproduced by permission.
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