Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of nature and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs … these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of the greatest poet from his birth out of his mother’s womb and from her birth out of her mother’s.

— Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: The First Edition (1855)

The whole preface (or epic poem?) reads like this. It feels like an overflowing garden of emotion in full bloom.

I don't think anything else I've read is quite like it. Maybe I should make it a mission to read banned books?