Walt Whitman
American poet, essayist, and journalist whose 1855 Leaves of Grass — revised and expanded across a lifetime into nine successive editions — is widely considered the founding text of distinctly American mystic poetry and the most influential single book in nineteenth-century American letters. Born in 1819 on Long Island, he worked as a printer, schoolteacher, journalist, and Civil War nurse before earning his living from his poetry. His expansive, unrhymed cataloging of bodies, landscapes, occupations, and souls created a new American mystical voice — one that could include the cosmos in its embrace and find sanctity in the most ordinary. He died in Camden, New Jersey, in 1892, having become the bard of American democracy and one of the great mystic poets of any tradition.
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Quotes by Walt Whitman
107 quotes“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.”
“Re-examine all you have been told.”
“Your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
“I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of the soul.”
“Whoever you are, holding me now in your hand, without one thing all will be useless.”
“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what any one supposed.”
“O me! O life! Of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless.”
“That you are here — that life exists, and identity. That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”
“There was never any more inception than there is now, nor any more youth or age than there is now.”
“And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his shroud.”
“Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex.”
“I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself.”
“Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?”
“Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.”
“You shall possess the good of the earth and sun.”
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
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