The Poetry of Democracy
Harold Kaplan said 'humanist aspirations' are the dominant American intellectual tradition. 1 But an abstract notion of democratic humanism is only part of the story. Kaplan explains democratic humanism in…
Calling citizen writers and poets. It’s time to re-evaluate the Classics. Many of the authors of the American Classics, as well as their foreign critics, were ‘aristocrats of the spirit’, as Harold Kaplan called them. Some of them had aristocratic ancestors and felt at home in European society. Most of them mistrusted democracy. It is time to re-examine their writings in this light, preferably with the help of knowledgeable sources such as Kaplan and his book Democratic Humanism and American Literature.