I celebrate myself and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
for every atom belonging to you as good belongs to me.
I loaf and invite my soul,
I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d of this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here of parent the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check, with original energy.
Walt Whitman, from his original 1855 version of Leaves of Grass