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This paper is an attempt at pondering over the role that should have been played by the Tunisian intellectual elite (literary women and men and the Academy) in the revolutionary period in Tunisia. The chaotic state, the great political, ideological, social and econo¬mic turmoil Tunisia went through after the fall of the Ben Ali regime might, in fact, be traced back - principally perhaps - to the absence of any role played or any achievement produced by the Tunisian in-tellectuals in shaping the Tunisian people’s ideas of Revolution, Nationhood, Democracy and Freedom. Unfortunately, the intellectuals’ voice has long been silenced, the intellectual “elite” has long been marginalized and now that Tunisians are entering a new and crucial era in their country’s history, the long-repressed Tunisian thinkers and intellectuals are - or at least seem to be - still unable not only to play but even to identify their own voice, their submerged voice. Tunisian intellectuals failed to display little if not any effort to come to terms with the vitality of the New Tunisia and what Revolutionary Tunisia, both as an idea and as an actual experience, necessitates on both national as well as international levels. The second part of this paper attempts to be a comparative ana lytical study of the roles played by two monumental intellectual literary figures, Walt Whitman, on the one hand, and Abu- l- Qasim Al-Shabbi, on the other, as two leading national figures who exem¬plify the role of the poet - as a representative figure of the intellectual elite in general - (a role that was not played by contemporary Tunisian intellectuals) who visualized the role of the poet as a prophetic genius who could perceive, interpret and change his own times. The second part of this paper will be based upon a rereading of the Tuni-sian Revolution as a historical moment from the lens of the literary analysis of the works of the Tunisian Abu- l- Qasim Al-Shabbi and the American Walt Whitman to demonstrate how these two poets recognized the vitality of their nations’ struggle for freedom and democracy and how they were committed and determined to promote their own visions of a better and more promising future for their nations through aesthetic norms. Indeed, both poets played a crucial role in the formation of and in embodying the democratic spirit of their nations enabling, thus, their countrymen to come to terms with their own lost values and lost senses of belonging and of being.
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