“Continuing our critical review, we shall refer now to Richard Chase, whose article, “The Theory of America”, helped us a lot in understanding the political mind of Whitman.
His article is centered on Democratic Vistas, which contains Whitman’s views on democracy and his personal beliefs in this field. According to the author, Whitman “had always believed that social reform was a matter of individual regeneration, was not a political but a moral and spiritual problem; and all the weaknesses and strength of this view are in Democratic Vistas.” (BLOOM, 1985, pp.55-63). Roy Harvey Pearce, another critic in this volume, contributes a study on the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass to it, “Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1860″, in which he traces Whitman’s revisions, rearrangements, additions and exclusions of the poems of this edition, which is, for him, the most important edition, and how these changes modified the body of the texts (1985, pp.65-86) through the years. Pearce reminds us in his article of the religious aspect of the Leaves, for Whitman had been working on the 1860 edition as the construction of a new Bible (1985, p.70), which would hold, when finished, 365 poems, one for each day of the year. A well-known fact is that Whitman was a constant reader of the Bible and in sections 2.5.6 and 3.4 there is more information on this subject, where we discuss his role as Adam (the book “Children of Adam” is dedicated to this theme) and provide a passage from his article “The Bible as Poetry”. Once more, Whitman shows his connection and distancing from Romanticism, for his approach to religion is not doubtful or without faith, as he sings in section 48 of “Song of Myself“: “No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God, and about death.” On the other hand, in general, Romantics suffered a “longing for extinction” and many contemplated suicide, for death appeared to them as the “only salvation” for those undergoing the “malady of the soul”. In this respect, there are two important aspects of Romanticism that must be emphasized that were not present in Whitman’s mind: “the quest for religion and the inability to embrace it”; this is a conflict that did not worry Whitman, for he himself was creating a religion that was in accordance with the love of God. Yet, as Schenk (1979, pp.63-77) highlights, although “the search for God and the rejection of God are in some ways characteristic of human nature in general [...] never before the Romantic era, it seems, were the two phenomena so inextricably interwoven”, for, paradoxical as it may seem, “the eighteenth century had witnessed a considerable weakening of the Christian religion over men’s minds”, however, the ‘Romantic yearning appeared to be the legacy of Christianity.’ “
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