Walt Whitman moves mountains with his words. I love not man less, but nature more... every atom that belongs to me as good as belongs to you... and your very flesh shall be a great poem... behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity, when I give, I give myself... Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself -- I am large, I contain multitudes.

The problem is, no one talks like that anymore. It's cool to say OMG and dude, and English teachers write lists of non-acceptable filler words for High School seniors who still can't find a better adjective than "cool."

I don't understand, because I'm blown away by his gems, and articulation. I want to get back to an age where our celebrities are people like Oscar Wilde, famed for his wit and nuanced, double layered speech – people having him for dinner weren’t sure if they were being insulted or not, but they sure knew he was clever.

Mr. Swirsky, high school English teacher of my heart, used to say, “everything’s a cycle,” and I can’t help but think it’s time to cycle back for another Renaissance. Technology has never been so openly available as it is now, so why is it not an age where we’re all impressively well-rounded? Instead, technology has done the opposite for us. Our memories have atrophied under the help and ease of which we can reach information. We don’t have to store any facts, because they’re always a click or text or google away.

I wrote my essay to get in here primarily about Whitman (with some cameos from my spiritual life and the ocean and Mr. Swirsky) because when I was fourteen years old I fell in love with with a man who could say what he needed to say, and say it so beautifully that we are still talking about it, two hundred years later; one of whose main themes was nearly always empathy and feeling the pain and joy and sorrows of another, desperately in love with a country who was still a screaming infant with a just-cut umbilical cord at the time.