Examines the 1867 poem As I sat Alone by Blue Ontario\u27s Shore and compares it to its antebellum version ( Poem of Many In One ) and to Democratic Vistas, interrogating Whitman\u27s refusal to engage with the complexities of the present moment as, with Hegelian logic, he proposes the end of history in the rise of the United States, conflating poet, people, and nation in a kind of transcendence of history, a transcendence that is troubled (but not defeated) by the Civil War and the social unrest of the Reconstruction period: both his antebellum and postbellum poetry in fact show a frustration with politics that flows directly from his desire to identify himself with the nation, to unite his poetic will with an American democratic ...
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