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IT IS NO SECRET that Walt Whitman liked to keep one eye trained on the future.1 He looked to posterity to incorporate and complete what had been attempted in Leaves of Grass. He had in mind, of course, not only the ramifications of Leaves of Grass as an aesthetic project, but also those of the social and spiritual values his book enshrined. This outlook, in fact, animated what was, perhaps, Whitman's most celebrated message to future poets: "I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, /. . . / Expecting the main things from you."2 The future as envisaged by Whitman tended to be open-ended and indeterminate, but it was not invariably so. In Democratic Vistas, for instance, Whitman speculated about where future poets might come from: "the infant genius of American poetic expression . . . lies sleeping, aside, unrecking itself, in some Western idiom, or native Michigan or Tennessee repartee, or stump speech. . . . Rude and coarse nursing-beds, these."3
In "Thoughts" [1860], a poem which tries to sum up America's then-current state of affairs, and then conjure up the future, the poetic subject looks specifically toward "immense spiritual results future years far West" but is aware, at the same time, that there are problematic moments when "society waits unformed, and is for a while between things ended and things begun" (LG 493). In the same poem we are given an instructive glimpse into the fitful, turbulent nature of literary and social change: "these [achievements] of mine and of the States will in their turn be convuls'd, and serve other parturitions and transitions" (493).
With the advantage of hindsight, we now recognize that Whitman's prophetic instincts were, in fact, fundamentally sound. Within a few years of the poet's death in 1892, as Lisa Szefel reminds us, the rough outlines of the Progressive Era, an interval of "parturitions and transitions," were already perceptible. The Progressives effectively cleared the space, she demonstrates, which would be occupied subsequently by High Modernism.4 Moreover, their writings, configured by the influence of Leaves of Grass, were a key part of the linkage which connected Whitman to a later generation of innovators-inspired misfits such as Henry Miller and Kenneth Patchen-who would adopt Whitman's values and...