Whitman's motto that he kept at his work-table:
The workshop . . .
The paper I write on or you
write on, every word we write,
every cross and twirl of the
pen, and the curious way we
write what we think, yet very
faintly . . .
In them realities for you and
me -- in them poems for you
and me . . .
In them themes, hints, provokers.
Come, said my soul,
Such verses for my body let us write, (for we are one,)
That should I after death invisibly return,
Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,
There to some group of mates the chants resuming,
(Tallying earth's soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)
Ever with pleas'd smile I may keep on,
Ever and ever yet the verses owning--as, first, I here and now
Signing for soul and body, set to them my name,
Walt Whitman
A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads
[Preface to November Boughs, 1888]
"After continued personal ambition and effort, as a young fellow, to enter with the rest into competition for the usual rewards, business, political, literary, &c.--to take part in the great mLlJe, both for victory's prize itself and to do some good--After years of those aims and pursuits, I found myself remaining possess'd, at the age of thirty-one to thirty-three, with a special desire and conviction. Or rather, to be quite exact, a desire that had been flitting through my previous life, or hovering on the flanks, mostly indefinite hitherto, had steadily advanced to the front, defined itself, and finally dominated everything else. This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days, and of current America--and to exploit that Personality, identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto poem or book.
Perhaps this is in brief, or suggests, all I have sought to do. Given the Nineteenth Century, with the United States, and what they furnish as area and points of view, 'Leaves of Grass' is, or seeks to be, simply a faithful and doubtless self-will'd record. In the midst of all, it gives one man's--the author's-- identity, ardors, observations, faiths, and thoughts, color'd hardly at all with any decided coloring from other faiths or other identities. Plenty of songs had been sung--beautiful, matchless songs--adjusted to other lands than these--another spirit and stage of evolution; but I would sing, and leave out or put in, quite solely with reference to America and to-day. Modern science and democracy seem'd to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past. As I see it now (perhaps too late,) I have unwittingly taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements--which I certainly would not assume to do now, knowing more clearly what it means."
"For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new poetic messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable."
"The Old World has had the poems of myths, fictions, feudalism, conquest, caste, dynastic wars, and splendid exceptional characters and affairs, which have been great; but the New World needs the poems of realities and science and of the democratic average and basic equality, which shall be greater. In the centre of all, and object of all, stands the Human Being."
"From another point of view 'Leaves of Grass' is avowedly the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality-- though meanings that do not usually go along with those words are behind all, and will duly emerge; and are sought to be lifted into a different light and atmosphere."
"Ever since what might be call'd thought, or the budding of thought, fairly began in my youthful mind, I had a desire to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance ('to justify the ways of God to man' is Milton's well-known and ambitious phrase) which is the foundation of moral America. I felt it all as positively then in my young days as I do now in my old ones; to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider'd from the point of view of all, but of each.
While I cannot understand it or argue it out, I full believe in a clue and purpose in Nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism, through Time. My book ought to emanate buoyancy and gladness legitimately enough, for it was grown out of those elements, and has been the comfort of my life since it was originally commenced.
One main genesis-motive of the 'Leaves' was my conviction (just as strong to-day as ever) that the crowning growth of the United States is to be spiritual and heroic. To help start and favor that growth--or even to call attention to it, or the need of it--is the beginning, middle and final purpose of the poems."
"'Leaves of Grass' indeed (I cannot too often reiterate) has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and other personal nature--an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America,) freely, fully and truly on record. I could not find any similar personal record in current literature that satisfied me. But it is not on 'Leaves of Grass' distinctively as literature, or a specimen thereof, that I feel to dwell, or advance claims. No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism."
"Concluding with two items for the imaginative genius of the West, when it worthily rises--First...that really great poetry is always...the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polish'd and select few; Second, that the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung." -------------------
1876 Preface: "Human thought, poetry or melody, must leave dim escapes and outlets--must possess a certain fluid, aerial character, akin to space itself." "Poetic style, when address'd to the Soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half- tints. True, it may be architecture; but again it may be the forest wild-wood, or the best effects thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks and cedars in the wind, and the impalpable odor."
1855 Preface: "The known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet." "The rhythm and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws, and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges."
James Wright: "Whitman's poetry has delicacy of music, of diction, and of form." "I mean (delicacy) to suggest powers of restraint, clarity, and wholeness, all of which taken together embody that deep spiritual inwardness, that fertile strength, which I take to be the most beautiful power of Whitman's poetry." "He can also teach courage, for he has great rhythmical daring; he seeks constantly for a music which really echoes and fulfills his imaginative vision." "Form in Whitman is a principle of imagination: the proliferating of images out of one unifying vision." "Form, in Whitman, is a principle of growth: one image or scene grows out of another." Walt Whitman: "We are all great poets, but only the greatest knows it."
From Song of Myself:
"I know I am solid and sound, To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means."
Song of Myself
1--"I celebrate myself, and sing myself....Nature without check with original energy."
2--"Respiration and inspiration...delight...the feeling of health....You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self."
3--"Inception...the procreant urge of the world...the perfect fitness and equanimity of things."
4--"I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait."
5--"I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other....Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvPd voice....And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields."
6--"All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses."
7--"I...am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away."
8--"I mind them or the show or resonance of them--I come and I depart."
9--"The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged."
10--"I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean'd in the corner."
11--"They do not think whom they souse with spray." 12--"I follow their movements."
13--"I believe in those wing'd purposes."
14--"What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me."
15--"Of these one and all I weave the song of myself."
16--"I resist any thing better than my own diversity."
17--"If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing....This the common air that bathes the globe."
18--"Vivas to those who have fail'd!"
19--"This hour I tell things in confidence." 20--"I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time."
21--"I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul....Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth! Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!"
virtue and about vice?"
23--"Endless unfolding of words of ages!....Materialism first and last imbuing."
24--"Walt Whitman, a kosmos...Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding....Through me forbidden voices....I believe in the flesh and the appetites, Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles....Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from, The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer....If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it....I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious, Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy."
25--"We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun....My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach....Writing and talk do not prove me."
26--"Now I will do nothing but listen...At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles, And that we call Being."
27--"To be in any form, what is that?....Mine is no callous shell."
28--"Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity."
29--"Did it make you ache so, leaving me?"
30--"All truths wait in all things....Logic and sermons never convince."
31--"I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff."
32--"They do not sweat and whine about their condition."
33--"I am afoot with my vision....Speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars...My voice is the wife's voice...I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there."
34--"Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate."
35--"Serene stands the little captain."
36--"Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves."
37--"I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg." 38--"That I could forget the mockers and insults!....That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning!"
39--"Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass...They descend in new forms from the tips of his fingers, They are wafted with the odor of this body or breath, they fly out of the glance of his eyes."
40--"When I give I give myself."
41--"The supernatural of no account, myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes."
42--"I know perfectly well my own egotism." 43--"My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths, Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all between ancient and modern....Accepting the Gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine....Belonging to the winders of the circuit of circuits."
44--"I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown....I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to be."
45--"My lovers suffocate me....Bussing my body with soft balsamic busses, Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine."
46--"I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured and never will be measured. I tramp a perpetual journey."
47--"If you would understand me go to the heights or water- shore, The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop or motion of waves a key."
48--"Nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is....And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, For I who am curious about each am not curious about God....I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself."
49--"I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected."
50--"There is that in me--I do not know what it is--but I know it is in me."
51--"(I am large, I contain multitudes.)" 52--"I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable."
Democratic Vistas
"I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the demand for facts, even the business materialism of the current age, our States. But woe to the age and land in which these things, movements, stopping at themselves, do not tend to ideas."
"A new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to these States. Book are to be call'd for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or framework. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does."
"We see our land, America, her literature, aesthetics, etc., as, substantially, the getting in form, or effusement and statement, of deepest basic elements and loftiest final meanings, of history and man--and the portrayal (under the eternal laws and conditions of beauty) of our own physiognomy, the subjective tie and expression of the objective, as from our own combination, continuation, and points of view--and the deposit and record of the national mentality, character, appeals, heroism, wars, and even liberties--where these, and all, culminate in native literary and artistic formulation, to be perpetuated; and not having which native, first-class formulation, she will flounder about, and her other, however imposing, eminent greatness, prove merely a passing gleam; but truly having which, she will understand herself, live nobly, nobly contribute, emanate, and, swinging, poised safely on herself, illumin'd and illuming, become a full-form'd world, and divine Mother not only of material but spiritual worlds, in ceaseless succession through time--the main thing being the average, the bodily, the concrete, the democratic, the popular, on which all the superstructures of the future are to permanently rest."
Pablo Neruda: "It is important that we should all recognize what it is that we owe to each other. We must continually keep renegotioating the 'internal debt' which weights upon writers every where. Each one of us owes much to his own intellectual hiretage and much to that whihc we have drawn from the cultural treasury of all the world." "I must start by acknowledging myself to be the humble servant of a poet who strode the earth with long, slow paces, pausing everywhere to love, to examine, to learn, to teach and admire." "What really counts is that Walt Whitman was not afraid to teach--which means to learn at the hands of life and undertake the responsibility of passing on the lesson!" "He had no fear of either moralizing or immoralizing, nor did he seek to separate the fields of pure and impure poetry."
1855 Preface: "The rhythm and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws, and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a bush, and take shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges."
James Wright: "He can also teach courage, for he has great rhythmical daring; he seeks constantly for a music which really echoes and fulfills his imaginative vision."
Whitman: "Common teachers or critics are always asking 'What does it mean?' Symphony of fine musician, or sunset, or sea-waves rolling up the beach--what do they mean? Undoubtedly in the most subtle-elusive sense they mean somehting--but who shall fathom and define those meanings?"
James Wright: "In the face of this sometimes difficult and prosaic material ('humanity's jagged escapades'), he is able to retain his delicacy, which is a power of mind as well as a quality of kindness." "He is sensitively precise about things that are often in themselves harsh, even brutal."
"He deliberately seeks in American life the occasions and persons who are central to that life; he sometimes finds them harsh and violent, as in the war; and he responds to the harsheness with a huge effort of imagination: to be delicate, precise, sensitive."
"He uses parallelism not as a device of repetition but as an occasion for development."
"Form in Whitman is a principle of imagination: the proliferating of images out of one unifying vision."
"Form, in Whitman, is a principle of growth: one image or scene or sound grows out of another."
Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass:
"Great is the faith of the flush of knowledge and of the investigation of the depths of qualities and things."
"The greatest poet...the others are as good as he, only he sees it and they do not."
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...."
"The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work." "He shall go directly to the creation."
"Without effort and without exposing in the lest how it is done the greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read."
"The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is."
"The soul has that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride and the one balances the other and neither can stretch too far while it stretches in company with the other."
"The messages of great poets to each man and woman are, Come to us on equal terms, Only then can you understand us. We are no better than you, What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy."
"The most affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out of the stronger wealth of himself."
"It is also not consistent with the reality of the soul to admit that there is anything in the known universe more divine than men and women."
"Men and women and the earth and all upon it are simply to be taken as they are, and the investigation of their past and present and future shall be unintermitted and shall be done with perfect candor."
"As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances."
"How beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor."
"Whatever satisfies the soul is truth."
"The young man who composedly periled his life and lost it has done exceedingly well for himself, while the man who has not periled his life and retains it to old age in riches and ease has perhaps achieved noting for himself worth mentioning."
"The direct trial of him who would be the greatest poet is today."
"A great poem is for ages and ages in common and for all degrees and complexions and all departments and sects and for a woman as much as a man and a man as much as a woman."
"A great poem is no finish to a man or woman but rather a beginning."
"Song of the Open Road":
"Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial."
"You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!"
"Now I re-examine philosophies and religions, They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents."
"Here is realization, Here is a man tallied--he realizes here what he has in him, The past, the future, majesty, love--if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them."
"Only the kernel of every object nourishes."
From Democratic Vistas:
"The great literatus will be known, among the rest, by his cheerful simplicity, his adherence to natural standards, his limitless faith in God, his reverence, and by the absence in him of doubt, ennui, burlesque, persiflage, or any strained or temporary fashion."
Walt Whitman: "There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now."
"I give the gifts of the universe to all men and women."