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.
quotes in library
Quotes by Walt Whitman
107 quotes“Wrench'd and sweaty — calm and cool then my body becomes.”
“To behold the day-break! The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows.”
“My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite. I laugh at what you call dissolution.”
“And I know the amplitude of time.”
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
“The last scud of day holds back for me.”
“It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any on the shadow'd wilds.”
“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.”
“But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.”
“And filter and fibre your blood.”
“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place search another.”
“I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
“My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach.”
“I sing the body electric.”
“As to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.”
“I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun.”
“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.”
“If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”
“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
Explore More Teachers
Discover wisdom from 500+ spiritual teachers across all traditions.
Browse All Teachers