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.
Walt WhitmanO magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! My South! O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!
Walt WhitmanThe past, the future, majesty, love - if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.
Walt Whitman