SOURCE: "Democratic Space: The Ecstatic Geography of Walt Whitman and Frank Lloyd Wright," in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, Summer, 1988, pp. 16-32.

In the following essay, Roche considers the shared conception of America's limitless space held by Walt Whitman and Wright, and discusses other affinities in their geographical outlook.

 The map speaks across the barriers of language;...
 A map invites attention alike synoptically and
 analytically. s

—Carl Sauer, "The Education of a Geographer"

Walt Whitman is our great poet of geography—a fact readily apparent to any of his countrymen as soon as they read him. Whitman was an augur, but of a discrete, American type, absorbed ecstatically in considerations of spatial form even as contemporary Europe was either attuned to the approach of the temporal shock waves of intellectual and political revolution, or hearing, with Arnold, the "long, withdrawing roar" of a secure past.

Whitman could...