e, by the people and for the people. His range of acquaintances was very broad, his interests even broader. While a carpenter's son, he could build houses during the day, and attend the opera in the evenings to be enthralled and raptured by the likes of the Italian prima donna, Signora Alboni, whom he described in "Song of Myself" as that:
             "lustrous orb" and "booming mother".
             Much of his poetry is influenced by the opera, especially the emotive music, cadences and arias of Italian opera. His poems easily allow themselves to be sung operatically as they are so expansive, relying on the human voice alone to provide the right rhythm and intonation, the highs and lows, the flourishes and melo-dramas, the bel-cantos and notes of "hushed neurotic ecstasies" that brought tears to his eyes even though he could hardly understand a word of Italian himself. But that didn't matter. He once remarked about his poetry that:
             "the words of my book [are] nothing, the drift of it, everything".
             He wanted more than to convey ideas and literal meaning in his poetry; he wanted to convey an "experience", an ecstasy beyond words, the sort of ecstasy he felt as a member of an audience listening to the likes of Signora Alboni.
             Because of his wood-pecker character and interests
             ...