After continued personal ambition and effort, as a young fellow, to enter with the rest into competition for the usual rewards, business, political, literary, etc. ⁠—to take part in the great melee, both for victory’s prize itself and to do some good⁠—After years of those aims and pursuits, I found myself remaining possess’d, at the age of thirty-one to thirty-three, with a special desire and conviction. Or rather, to be quite exact, a desire that had been flitting through my previous life, or hovering on the flanks, mostly indefinite hitherto, had steadily advanced to the front, defined itself, and finally dominated everything else. This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days, and of current America⁠—and to exploit that Personality, identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto poem or book.

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.