Leaves of Grass is the great American epic and one of the great epics of world literature: with a voice as vigorous as it is subtle, it sings the birth of the United States and its development as a nation. His poems reflect the country's bustling diversity, its heterogeneous settlers and its vast landscapes, and its untamed, irreverent, artless character. It is a democratic epic, breaking the old principles of European societies and the equally old aesthetics that extolled them, and proclaiming the hopes and needs of the New World, where rich and poor, men and women, black and white, are called to be free and equal, and affections reign over interests. But Leaves of Grass is also the portrait of a person, Walt Whitman, who pours his singular passions and his most intimate longings into his pages: "This is not a book: / whoever touches it, touches a man," he writes in a late poem. The love for nature, the strength of her eroticism, the turbulence of life in New York and the overwhelming musical impetus of her voice find a long echo in the poems of the book. For Harold Bloom, Whitman constitutes the center of the American canon, because every "voice that in our contemporary literature stands alone, wounded or stoic, tends to take on Whitmanian tones".