Walt Whitman | poisonous to... the life-blood of democracy |
The great poems, Shakspere included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it from other lands, ultra-marine, have had their birth in courts, and bask’d and grown in castle sunshine; all smell of princes' favors.
—Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1871
Library of Congress