"The great poet digests the experience of the world and returns it in the form of a song."

"I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best."

"I have no doubt that the universe is a gigantic poem."

"I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced an…"

"I am the sworn poet of the new, modern, democratic man."