Walt Whitman

The poet who tried to contain the whole democratic nation in a single expanding book and very nearly did. Leaves of Grass sings the equal dignity of every person and every kind of work, the self that is also the crowd, the e pluribus unum made into verse. He revised it his whole life. To read Whitman is to hear the republic at its most generous and least afraid, insisting that the common person is the proper subject of the highest art.