Walt Whitman In Democratic Vistas, an 1871 prose work, writes,

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believed in (for all this glow, and these melodramatic screamings), nor is humanity itself believed in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? . . . . It is as if we were somehow being endowed with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.

Allen Ginsberg, asks, a century after the first publication of Leaves of Grass,

"America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?"

The conversation is then taken up by the people who have brought you Levi's Blue Jeans since 1849, using Walt Whitman's voice from a cylindrical wax recording.