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“I tramp a perpetual journey.”
“I know I am august, I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.”
“I see, dance, laugh, sing.”
“As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night.”
“Have you outstript the rest? Are you the President?”
“It is a trifle, they will more than arrive there every one, and still pass on.”
“I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness.”
“All seems beautiful to me.”
“I can repeat over to men and women, you have done such good to me, I would do the same to you.”
“I will recruit for myself and you as I go.”
“To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.”
“Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself.”
“It is not far. It is within reach.”
“I do not wish to be a tame lover.”
“Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give, I give myself.”
“I am satisfied — I see, dance, laugh, sing.”
“To know the merits of the past contained in the present.”
“What is more or less than a touch?”
“Logic and sermons never convince. The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.”
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