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“Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.”
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
“I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.”
“Be curious, not judgmental.”
“Keep your face always toward the sunshine — and shadows will fall behind you.”
“Resist much, obey little.”
“Whoever degrades another degrades me.”
“Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air.”
“To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle.”
“The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections.”
“There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.”
“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead.”
“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd.”
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition.”
“Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.”
“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
“Look for me under your boot-soles.”
“Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.”
“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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