Kenneth Rexroth, from "Walt Whitman," in "Classics Revisited XXXV," Saturday Review (September 3, 1966).

The poet Kenneth Rexroth, writing in the nineteen-sixties, viewed Whitman as a neglected hero, forgotten during a long "predatory" period in American history, but deserving of rediscovery at a moment when his utopian dream of cultural rather than political revolution in the United States seemed once again to be a possibility.

In all of Whitman's many celebrations of labor, abstract relations are never mentioned. Money appears to be scorned. Sailors, carpenters, longshoremen, bookkeepers, seamstresses, engineers, artists—all seem to be working for "nothing," participants in a universal creative effort where each discovers his ultimate individuation. The day's work over, they loaf and admire the world on summer hillsides, blowing on leaves of grass, or strolling the quiet First-Day streets of Manhattan, arms about one another's broad shoulders, or making love in religious ecstasy. Unlike almost all other ideal societies, Whitman's utopia, which he calls "These States," is not a projection of the virtues of an idealized past into the future, but an attempt to extrapolate the future into the American present. His is a realized eschatology.

The Middle Ages called hope a theological virtue. They meant that, with faith and love, hope was essential to the characteristic being of mankind. Now hope is joy in the presence of the future in the present. On this joy creative effort depends, because creation relates past, present, and future in concrete acts that result in enduring objects and experiences... Again and again he identifies himself with a trans-figured America, the community of work in love and love in work, this community with the meaning of the universe, the vesture of God, a great chain of being which begins, or ends, in Walt Whitman, or his reader—Adam-Kadmon who contains all things—ruled in order by love.