Perhaps this is in brief, or suggests, all I have sought to do. Given the nineteenth century, with the United States, and what they furnish as area and points of view, Leaves of Grass is, or seeks to be, simply a faithful and doubtless self-will’d record. In the midst of all, it gives one man’s⁠—the author’s⁠—identity, ardors, observations, faiths, and thoughts, color’d hardly at all with any decided coloring from other faiths or other identities. Plenty of songs had been sung⁠—beautiful, matchless songs⁠—adjusted to other lands than these⁠—another spirit and stage of evolution; but I would sing, and leave out or put in, quite solely with reference to America and today. Modern science and democracy seem’d to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past. As I see it now (perhaps too late,) I have unwittingly taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements⁠—which I certainly would not assume to do now, knowing more clearly what it means.