avowedly chant 'the great pride of man in himself,' and permit it to
be more or less a motif of nearly all my verse. I think this pride
indispensable to an American. I think it not inconsistent with
obedience, humility, deference, and self-questioning.

A new theme also was to be found in the relation of the sexes, conceived
in a natural, simple and healthy form, and he protests against poor Mr.
William Rossetti's attempt to Bowdlerise and expurgate his song.

From another point of view Leaves of Grass is avowedly the song of Sex
and Amativeness, and even Animality--though meanings that do not
usually go along with these words are behind all, and will duly
emerge; and all are sought to be lifted into a different light and
atmosphere. Of this feature, intentionally palpable in a few lines, I
shall only say the espousing principle of those lines so gives breath
to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been
left unwritten were those lines omitted. . . .

Universal as are certain facts and symptoms of communities . . . there
is nothing so rare in modern conventions and poetry as their normal
recognizance. Literature is always calling in the doctor for
consultation and confession, and always giving evasions and swathing
suppressions in place of that 'heroic nudity,' on which only a genuine
diagnosis . . . can be built. And in respect to editions of Leaves of
Grass in time to come (if there should be such) I take occasion now to
confirm those lines with the settled convictions and deliberate
renewals of thirty years, and to hereby prohibit, as far as word of
mine can do so, any elision of them.

But beyond all these notes and moods and motives is the lofty spirit of a
grand and free acceptance of all things that are worthy of existence. He
desired, he says, 'to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should
directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom,
health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every
human or other existence, not only consider'd from the point of view of
all, but of each.' His two final utterances are that 'really great
poetry is always . . . the result of a national spirit, and not the
privilege of a polish'd and select few'; and that 'the strongest and
sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.'

Such are the views contained in the opening essay A Backward Gla