Leaves of Grass

what are whitman's views of science and democracy?

the internet doesnt really go into detail. some one please please help :(

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I'm not an expert on Whitman but I found two sites with some good detail. They are listed in the source links below. Please let me know if you have any questions. You can use this thread.

Whitman envisioned democracy not just as a political system but as a way of experiencing the world. In the early nineteenth century, people still harbored many doubts about whether the United States could survive as a country and about whether democracy could thrive as a political system. To allay those fears and to praise democracy.......

Whitman was conversant with the lineaments of contemporary science—astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, including evolution. He was an avid, if unsystematic, reader of popular books and magazine articles on science. As newspaper editor in the 1840s and ‘50s, he supported scientific enterprises. Later, when The Origin of Species had become a cause celebre, the Good Grey Poet plumped for Darwinism......

Source(s)

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/whitman/themes.html http://liberator.net/articles/SloanGary/WaltWhitman.html