Extract

I contain multitudes.

A man leans on the grass at his ease, observing a spear of summer grass, and from that single gesture of attention unfurls the most expansive poem in the English language. Whitman catalogues America: its ferryboats and slaughterhouses, its prostitutes and presidents, its slaves and its open road, declaring himself the voice of every body and every soul, containing multitudes without contradiction. First published in 1855 in a slim, self-financed volume, the poem scandalized a nation that was not yet ready to hear its own democratic music sung so bodily, so tenderly, so without shame. It remains the original American psalm, the proof that one consciousness, sufficiently awake, can hold an entire nation inside a single breath.