As Walt Whitman gazed down the democratic vistas of culture, he tried to see
beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness, importance and triviality. It
seemed to him servile or snobbish to make any discriminations of value, except
the most generous ones. Great claims were made for candor by our boldest, most
delirious prophet of cultural revolution. Nobody would fret about beauty and
ugliness, he implied, who was accepting a sufficiently large embrace of the
real, of the inclusiveness and vitality of actual American experience.
