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.

From another point of view Leaves of Grass is avowedly the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality⁠—though meanings that do not usually go along with those words are behind all, and will duly emerge; and all are sought to be lifted into a different light and atmosphere. Of this feature, intentionally palpable in a few lines, I shall only say the espousing principle of those lines so gives breath of life to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. Difficult as it will be, it has become, in my opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior men and women towards the thought and fact of sexuality, as an element in character, personality, the emotions, and a theme in literature. I am not going to argue the question by itself; it does not stand by itself. The vitality of it is altogether in its relations, bearings, significance⁠—like the clef of a symphony. At last analogy the lines I allude to, and the spirit in which they are spoken, permeate all Leaves of Grass , and the work must stand or fall with them, as the human body and soul must remain as an entirety.