Reexamine All You Have Been Told

From the Preface to the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman's manifesto for the ideal poet and reader. The full passage reads: "re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem." The Preface was a dense prose statement of Whitman's poetic vision; it was dropped from later editions as the poems themselves took on that role. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had previously called for exactly this kind of American poet, famously wrote to Whitman calling the 1855 collection "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed."