I'm pretty sure that two sentences you quote don't form a meaningful pair, so I wouldn't expect the second sentence to explain the first. The sentence "Whitman

I'm pretty sure that two sentences you quote don't form a meaningful pair, so I wouldn't expect the second sentence to explain the first. The sentence "Whitman was unequivocally declaring his own independence from poetic conventions and niceties." relates to what Whitman was doing, i.e. to announcing himself as "American, one of the roughs" in an earlier sentence. "... Every atom belongs as good to you" corresponds to the later phrase "Here was a poet of the people for the people". That's my reading anyway. The structure is ABAB: quote, quote, gloss, gloss.