As for native American individuality, though certain to come, and on a large scale, the distinctive and ideal type of Western character (as consistent with the operative political and even moneymaking features of United States’ humanity in the nineteenth century as chosen knights, gentlemen and warriors were the ideals of the centuries of European feudalism) it has not yet appear’d. I have allow’d the stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear upon American individuality and assist it⁠—not only because that is a great lesson in Nature, amid all her generalizing laws, but as counterpoise to the leveling tendencies of Democracy⁠—and for other reasons. Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions, I 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.