1855 Walt Whitman

In Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman describes himself as the poet of the body and the soul. He celebrates sensuality and the joy of immediate physical life. Part of Whitman‘s inclusiveness of vision is that the entier body is crucial and that we are the same in death. „For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.“ We arise from nature, and to nature, the grass, we return. By affirming ourselves as leaves of grass, we become more than individual leaves. We become part of the unity that is the field of green blades in the sun. 

1925–6 Gertrude Stein

In "Composition as Explanation" Gertrude Stein talks about the methods she applies to writing: continuous present, beginning again and again, using everything, everything being alike and naturally different at the same time. Stein also talks about time after the war, that peace will make time take new forms. She talks about the relationship between time and composition, especially the relationship between time, composition, and perspective. 

Stein‘s two concluding sentences "And afterwards. Now that is all." could read, „I have spoken, here I finish my lecture,“ like a rhetorical formula at the end of a story or, if you know the lecture, „The only certainty is the present, a continuous now.“