and-ever-expanded

Updated: May 7, 2025

Poetry, largely consider'd, is an evolution, sending out improved and-ever-expanded types in one sense, the past, even the best of it, necessarily giving place, and dying out. For our existing world, the bases on which all the grand old poems were built have become vacuums and even those of many comparatively modern ones are broken and half-gone.

Walt Whitman - Complete Prose Works: Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy