And as to you Corpse I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, I reach to the leaf… - Walt Whitman

The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into any thing that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer ... he is individual... he is complete in himself... the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not.

The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time,
The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife;
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

America must welcome all — -Chinese, Irish, German, pauper or not, criminal or not — -all, all, without exceptions: become an asylum for all who choose to come. We may have drifted away from this principle temporarily but time will bring us back. … America is not for special types, for the caste, but for the great mass of people — -the vast, surging, hopeful, army of workers. Dare we deny them a home — -close the doors in their face — — take possession of all and fence it in and then sit down satisfied with our system — -convinced that we have solved our problem? I for my part refuse to connect America with such a failure — -such a tragedy, for tragedy it would be.