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Brief Introductory Note

From a distance of fourteen years from orginally writing this book, I look back and think to rework sections of it, but I suspect that would lead me to rewrite it as a new project, so I am leaving it as it is. That said, the main argument holds fast. Walt Whitman wanted to bolster the American democratic sprit by creating a democratic literature through his Leaves of Grass, and he wanted to create something epic, so he crafted a new form, the lyric-epic, to write his foundational democratic poetic text. Pablo Neruda felt that a people must have the mindset and culture of a political ideology for it to take root, so he wrote Canto general as a foundational text for communism in Latin America. Whitman was already an influence for him, so he took Whitman’s idea for a lyric-epic and reformulated it for his own use. In both books, these poets want to politicize the reader, Whitman for democracy and Neruda for communism, and both poets have become over time foundational poets for their countries.