The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night, Ya-honk! he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation: The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen closer, I find its purpose and place up there toward the November sky.

O America! Because you build for mankind I build for you.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of a man.

For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new poetic messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable.

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.

And as to me, I know nothing else but miracles

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest.