The Song of the Land

I just picked this up today from the American Fork Steel Days art show, where it received 1st place in the professional drawing division. Hooray!

Walt Whitman wrote "Leaves of Grass" over a century ago, yet he really had a grasp of the unity that we'd need to feel as a people today. He praised the laboring people of the land using the metaphor of music. He wrote of the sweeping strains and pulsating rhythms of a mighty nation at work and at play. “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,” Whitman proclaimed. He acknowledged mechanics, carpenters, masons, shoemakers, woodcutters, mothers, “each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, . . . singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.”


--"I Hear America Singing" from Leaves of Grass.