So interpreters have been able to frame his views on America in many different ways. One of these is an enormous, enthusiastic love of America, reflected equally in his most famous prose essay about America, “Democratic Vistas.” Whitman’s thousands of lines devoted to America also hold great variety and even contradiction. However there are some basic themes that run consistently through all the poems. “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” So they hold an equally vast variety of thoughts and ideas. They reflect his vast variety of experiences, moods, and inspirations over all those years. The poems in Leaves of Grass were written over some 30 years. So far, though, no poet has arisen to challenge his preeminent status. Whitman made it clear that he aimed to be the first “national expresser,” the first poet to put in words what was “common to all” Americans: “I heard that you ask’d for something … to define America … Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.” But he often said that he thought of his work as merely a beginning, inspiring even greater poets and myth-makers in the future. “There could hardly happen anything that would more serve the States,” he wrote, “than possessing an aggregate of heroes, characters, exploits, sufferings, prosperity or misfortune, glory or disgrace, common to all, typical of all - no less, but even greater would it be to possess the aggregation of a cluster of mighty poets, artists, teachers, fit for us, national expressers, comprehending and effusing for the men and women of the States, what is universal, native, common to all.” He wanted to be the nation’s first great myth-maker. But Whitman wanted to be more than just a great poet. He spent his life writing endless prose essays and one book of poetry, his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman is America’s most renowned, most influential, and many say its greatest, poet ever.
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