Leaves of Grass, Book 15 summary

What happens

1. The speaker offers workers equality and intimacy, rejecting the idea that rank, education, illness, or wrongdoing makes them lesser beings.
2. He recognizes people across ages, countries, and occupations, describing a value available through ordinary experience rather than printed information.
3. He places human life above profit, institutions, and cultural achievements, arguing that people give these things their meaning.
4. He declares that government serves people and that art and music depend on their living responses.
5. He joins material things with the soul and catalogs trades, tools, factories, transport, and daily tasks as sources of meaning.
6. He locates happiness nearby and refuses to value books, money, or property as highly as living people.

In this book

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