I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. By May 1 Whitman received a promotion to a slightly higher clerkship and publiWalt Whitmand Drum-Taps. Another possible lover was Bill Duckett.

His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery but later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy. Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31 1819 – March 26 1892) was an American poet essayist and journalist. Whitman's major work Leaves of Grass was first publiWalt Whitmand in 1855 with his own money.