Songs of Democracy

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... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Windham Press is committed to bringing the lost cultural heritage of ages past into the 21st century through high-quality reproductions of original, classic printed works at affordable prices. This book has been carefully crafted to utilize the original images of antique books rather than error-prone OCR text. This also preserves the work of the original typesetters of these classics, unknown craftsmen who laid out the text, often by hand, of each and every page you will read. Their subtle art involving judgment and interaction with the text is in many ways superior and more human than the mechanical methods utilized today, and gave each book a unique, hand-crafted feel in its text that connected the reader organically to the art of bindery and book-making. We think these benefits are worth the occasional imperfection resulting from the age of these books at the time of scanning, and their vintage feel provides a connection to the past that goes beyond the mere words of th