Walt Whitman

Songs of Democracy Walt Whitman

SONGS of DEMOCRACY
By WALT WHITMAN

THICK-SPRINKLED BUNTING
Thick-sprinkled bunting! Flag of stars!
Long yet your road, fateful flag!?long yet your road, and lined with bloody death!
For the prize I see at issue, at last is the world!
All its ships and shores I see, interwoven with your threads, greedy banner!
Dream?d again the flags of kings, highest born, to flaunt unrival?d?
O hasten, flag of man! O with sure and steady step, passing highest flags of kings,
Walk supreme to the heavens, mighty symbol?run up above them all,
Flag of stars! thick-sprinkled bunting!


INTRODUCTION

THOSE who know their Whitman will no doubt find somewhat ridiculous an enterprise which purposes to isolate a limited number of his poems under the title of the present volume, so completely is his work given up to the celebration of democracy. They will be fortified in their views, moreover, by the consciousness that the author himself would have shared them. Whitman saw in Leaves of Grass an organism, something which must be taken entire or not at all. Of the considerable number of "Selections" offered to the fearful, only two or three were published with his consent, and that a very reluctant consent, yielded at the promptings of a kindly desire not to wound with a rebuff the good intentions of his friends. He seems to have felt they were, after all, Edmund Clarence Stedman?s or Elizabeth Porter Gould?s selections, and as such were important only for the light they threw on the judgment of those excellent persons and the taste of their friends. He himself stood squarely by all that he had written, and refused to delete a line even at the urging of his much-admired Emerson. In his old age, face to face with his unpopularity, with the disapproval, even with the "anger and contempt," of his own time, he notes as "the best comfort of the whole business (after a band of the dearest friends and upholders ever vouchsafed to man or cause?doubtless all the more faithful and uncompromising?this little phalanx!?for being so few)" that "un-stopp?d and unwarp?d by any influence outside the soul within me, I have had my say entirely my own way and put it unerringly on record?the value thereof to be decided by time." Clearly it behooves one who performs yet another mutilation to prove it justified by different motives and conditions from those upon which the poet passed when he registered his veto.

Let it be understood, then, at the outset, that I heartily sympathize with Whitman?s attitude. I have made no attempt to propitiate the self-appointed arbiters of "the best that is known and thought in the world" by selecting those poems which seem least scornful of the time-honored...

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