Without yielding an inch the workingman and working-woman were to be in my pages from first to last. The ranges of heroism and loftiness with which Greek and feudal poets endow’d their godlike or lordly born characters⁠—indeed prouder and better based and with fuller ranges than those⁠—I was to endow the democratic averages of America. I was to show that we, here and today, are eligible to the grandest and the best⁠—more eligible now than any times of old were. I will also want my utterances (I said to myself before beginning) to be in spirit the poems of the morning. (They have been founded and mainly written in the sunny forenoon and early midday of my life.) I will want them to be the poems of women entirely as much as men. I have wish’d to put the complete Union of the States in my songs without any preference or partiality whatever. Henceforth, if they live and are read, it must be just as much South as North⁠—just as much along the Pacific as Atlantic⁠—in the valley of the Mississippi, in Canada, up in Maine, down in Texas, and on the shores of Puget Sound.