e._, since the secession war,) to enter on its
full democratic career?
Of the whole, poems and prose, (not attending at all to chronological
order, and with original dates and passing allusions in the heat and
impression of the hour, left shuffled in, and undisturb'd,) the chants
of "Leaves of Grass," my former volume, yet serve as the indispensable
deep soil, or basis, out of which, and out of which only, could come
the roots and stems more definitely indicated by these later pages.
(While that volume radiates physiology alone, the present one, though
of the like origin in the main, more palpably doubtless shows the
pathology which was pretty sure to come in time from the other.)
In that former and main volume, composed in the flush of my health and
strength, from the age of 30 to 50 years, I dwelt on birth and life,
clothing my ideas in pictures, days, transactions of my time, to give
them positive place, identity--saturating them with that vehemence
of pride and audacity of freedom necessary to loosen the mind
of still-to-be-form'd America from the accumulated folds,
the superstitions, and all the long, tenacious and stifling
anti-democratic authorities of the Asiatic and European past--my
enclosing purport being to express, above all artificial regulation
and aid, the eternal bodily composite, cumulative, natural character
of one's self.[34]
Estimating the American Union as so far, and for some time to come, in
its yet formative condition, I bequeath poems and essays as nutriment
and influences to help truly assimilate and harden, and especially to
furnish something toward what the States most need of all, and which
seems to me yet quite unsupplied in literature, namely, to show them,
or begin to show them, themselves distinctively, and what they are
for.
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