democratic art and literature

"The slow fermentation of democratic spirit within significant sections of the American population was palpable. The ethos of equality with liberty guaranteed by elections was inscribed in their simple body language, tobacco-chewing habits and easy manners, their bold dreams and high expectations, their self-consciously democratic art and literature - for instance, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), a celebration of the potential boundlessness of the American experiment with democracy and the power of the poet to rupture conventional language, and the greatest of all nineteenth-century American novels, Hermann Melville's Moby Dick (1851), a tale that warned against the hubris and self-destruction that awaits all those who act as if the world contains no boundaries, rules or moral limits." 

John Keane, 2009, The Life and Death of Democracy, Simon & Schuster
http://johnkeane.net/books/the-life-and-death-of-democracy/about-the-book

Walt Whitman 'Leaves of Grass'