Not but what the brawn of "Leaves of Grass" is, I hope, thoroughly
spiritualized everywhere, for final estimate, but, from the very
subjects, the direct effect is a sense of the life, as it should be,
of flesh and blood, and physical urge, and animalism. While there
are other themes, and plenty of abstract thoughts and poems in the
volume--while I have put in it passing and rapid but actual glimpses
of the great struggle between the nation and the slave-power,
(1861-'65,) as the fierce and bloody panorama of that contest unroll'd
itself: while the whole book, indeed, revolves around that four years'
war, which, as I was in the midst of it, becomes, in "Drum-Taps,"
pivotal to the rest entire--and here and there, before and afterward,
not a few episodes and speculations--_that_--namely, to make a
type-portrait for living, active, worldly, healthy personality,
objective as well as subjective, joyful and potent, and modern and
free, distinctively for the use of the United States, male and
female, through the long future--has been, I say, my general object.
(Probably, indeed, the whole of these varied songs, and all my
writings, both volumes, only ring changes in some sort, on the
ejaculation, How vast, how eligible, how joyful, how real, is a human
being, himself or herself.)
Though from no definite plan at the time, I see now that I have
unconsciously sought, by indirections at least as much as directions,
to express the whirls and rapid growth and intensity of the United
States, the prevailing tendency and events of the Nineteenth century,
and largely the spirit of the whole current world, my time; for I feel
that I have partaken of that spirit, as I have been deeply interested
in all those events, the closing of long-stretch'd eras and ages, and,
illustrated in the history of the United States, the opening of
larger ones.
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