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.

Democracy has been so retarded and jeopardized by powerful personalities, that its first instincts are fain to clip, conform, bring in stragglers, and reduce everything to a dead level. While the ambitious thought of my song is to help the forming of a great aggregate Nation, it is, perhaps, altogether through the forming of myriads of fully develop’d and enclosing individuals. Welcome as are equality’s and fraternity’s doctrines and popular education, a certain liability accompanies them all, as we see. That primal and interior something in man, in his soul’s abysms, coloring all, and, by exceptional fruitions, giving the last majesty to him⁠—something continually touch’d upon and attain’d by the old poems and ballads of feudalism, and often the principal foundation of them⁠—modern science and Democracy appear to be endangering, perhaps eliminating. But that forms an appearance only; the reality is quite different. The new influences, upon the whole, are surely preparing the way for grander individualities than ever. Today and here personal force is behind everything, just the same. The times and depictions from the Iliad to Shakespeare inclusive can happily never again be realized⁠—but the elements of courageous and lofty manhood are unchanged.