““Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the "grey sick faces of onanists," etc., etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The "democratic vistas" have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilisation as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and become a passive attitude—even "decadent," if that word means anything.””
![“You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting. I wanted to work in this environment.” quote by Anne Waldman](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/b28/anne-waldman-4046_environment_you-really-felt-a-radical-shift-in-the-a_2555670.jpg)
