building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

on foot and on horseback animate the waterfront. Other moving boats complete
the scene both close‐up and in the distance, sailing up and down the river. In other
words a bird’s eye view that mainly shows a picture of the city, illustrates the
fundamental role played by the river economy. You realise that without boats there
would not even be any development for the city.
The scene portrayed must have been so common that a similar reasoning can be
made when thinking of images of New Orleans [Figure 71] and other river towns
along the lengths of the great waterways. Of the old pastoral world there remain
only a few rafts dragged along by the current. However, the raft makes a strong
contrast which American culture will attempt to mediate and heal. The freedom of
a wild, rough world featuring only traditional tools and moved by natural
mechanisms, clashes with the sophisticated, technological world of the steamboat.
The success of the individual, who discovers himself in contact with nature,
becomes an ideology which competes, as Whitman’s poems explain so well, with
“the word Democratic, the word En‐Mass” 182 . It is essentially the same idea of
American democracy, which is based on this contradiction between the individual
and the crowd and is fostered in the pair formed by democracy and nature.
Whitman’s effort consists precisely of an evocation of the spirit of the nation and of
its transformation into the muse of Democracy. The ideal of freedom converges
with the umpteenth projections of the “I myself‐poet”.
It should not appear strange that the pioneer’s dream/myth becomes ideally
stronger in Whitman’s poem, just when he is partially broken by the means of
transport, which enable many to share his experience. Where once the pioneer
stood alone, now there is no longer any wilderness, but only the institutions of a
democratic government organised on a federal scale: “These States are the amplest
poem, / here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations 183 .
182 WHITMAN, Walt, Foglie d’erba, [Leaves of grass] preface by Giorgio Manganelli, selection,
introduction and notes by Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli, translation by Ariodante Marianni, Milan,
BUR, 2010 (the English text published in the Italian book is from Leaves of Grass, edited by Harold W.
Blodgett and Sculley Bradley, New York, NY University Press, 1965; first ed. of Leaves of Grass is in
1855), p. 6
183 Ibid., p. 382
109