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, he sings the birth of the United States and its development as a nation. His poems collect the bustling diversity of the country, its heterogeneous inhabitants and its vast landscapes, and its indomitable, irreverent character, free from artifice.
It is a democratic epic, which casts away the old principles of European societies and the equally old aesthetics that extolled them, and proclaims 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 rule over interests. But Leaves of Grass is also the portrait of a person, Walt Whitman, who pours his unique passions and his most intimate longings into its pages: "This is not a book: / who touches it, touches a man," he writes in a late poem.
The love of nature, the force of his eroticism, the turbulence of life in New York, and the overwhelming musical impetus in his voice find an extended echo in the poems in 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 assume Whitmanian tones."