"I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong..."
Source: Poetry Foundation
Walt Whitman is America’s world poet—a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. In Leaves of Grass (1855, 1891-2), he celebrated democracy, nature, love, and friendship.
The speakers in Emily Dickinson’s poetry are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison,
