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“You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me.”
“You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.”
“To touch my person to some one else's is about as much as I can stand.”
“I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise.”
“I do not call one greater and one smaller. That which fills its period and place is equal to any.”
“Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.”
“Camerado, I give you my hand.”
“Allons! the road is before us.”
“It is provided in the very essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.”
“Now I will do nothing but listen.”
“And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own.”
“And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own.”
“All men ever born are also my brothers.”
“And the women my sisters and lovers.”
“And that a kelson of the creation is love.”
“I do not despise you priests, all time, the world over.”
“My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths.”
“Encompassing worship ancient and modern, and all between ancient and modern.”
“I am he attesting sympathy.”
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