SOURCE: "Literature and the Authority of Technology," in Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, edited by Frederick Amrine, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989, pp. 169-75.

In the following excerpt, Orvell examines Whitman's treatment of technology and his influence on such modern writers as John Dos Passos and James Agee.

Whitman, who is the starting point for modern American literature in so many ways, took it upon himself in Democratic Vistas (1871) to define the character of American culture in a way that has had continuing relevance throughout the twentieth century: "America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science or the modern, but inspire itself with science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past". Starting with the close observation of nature, the poet works by analogies, by indirections...