dreams and passions
of his boyhood and early manhood, he goes on to say:

These, however, and much more might have gone on and come to naught
(almost positively would have come to naught,) if a sudden, vast,
terrible, direct and indirect stimulus for new and national
declamatory expression had not been given to me. It is certain, I
say, that although I had made a start before, only from the occurrence
of the Secession War, and what it show'd me as by flashes of
lightning, with the emotional depths it sounded and arous'd (of
course, I don't mean in my own heart only, I saw it just as plainly in
others, in millions)--that only from the strong flare and provocation
of that war's sights and scenes the final reasons-for-being of an
autochthonic and passionate song definitely came forth.

I went down to the war fields of Virginia . . . lived thenceforward in
camp--saw great battles and the days and nights afterward--partook of
all the fluctuations, gloom, despair, hopes again arous'd, courage
evoked--death readily risk'd--_the cause_, too--along and filling
those agonistic and lurid following years . . . the real parturition
years . . . of this henceforth homogeneous Union. Without those three
or four years and the experiences they gave, Leaves of Grass would not
now be existing.

Having thus obtained the necessary stimulus for the quickening and
awakening of the personal self, some day to be endowed with universality,
he sought to find new notes of song, and, passing beyond the mere passion
for expression, he aimed at 'Suggestiveness' first.

I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently
with my scheme. The reader will have his or her part to do, just as
much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or
thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the
theme or thought--there to pursue your own flight.

Another 'impetus-word' is Comradeship, and other 'word-signs' are Good
Cheer, Content and Hope. Individuality, especially, he sought for:

I have allowed the stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear
upon American individuality and assist it--not only because that is a
great lesson in Nature, amid all her generalising laws, but as
counterpoise to the leveling tendencies of Democracy--and for other
reasons. Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions, I