Walt Whitman

“ For none more than you is immortality.
Each man to himself, and each woman to herself, such as the word of the
past and present, and the word of immortality;
No one can acquire for another—not one!
Not one can grow for another—not one!
The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him;
The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him;
The murder is to the murderer, and comes back most to him;
The theft is to the thief, and comes back most to him;
The love is to the lover, and conies back most to him;
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail ”

“ Something for us is pouring now, more than Niagara pouring;
Torrents of men, (sources and rills of the North-west, are you indeed
inexhaustible?)
What, to pavements and homesteads here—what were those storms of the
mountains and sea?
What, to passions I witness around me to-day, was the sea risen?
Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds?
Lo! from deeps more unfathomable, something more deadly and savage;
Manhattan, rising, advancing with menacing front—Cincinnati, Chicago,
unchained;
—What was that swell I saw on the ocean? behold what comes here! ”

“ They shall not deign to defend immortality, or God, or the perfection of things, or liberty, or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America, and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.
The English language befriends the grand American expression—it is brawny enough, and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of a race who, through all change of circumstance, was never without the idea of political liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has attracted the terms of daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. ”

“ The American poets are to enclose old and new; for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions: he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit responds to his country's spirit: he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes. Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes, Missouri and Columbia and Ohio and Saint Lawrence with the Falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do not embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure into him. ”

“ The prudence of the mere wealth and respectability of the most esteemed life appears too faint for the eye to observe at all when little and large alike drop quietly aside at the thought of the prudence suitable for immortality. What is wisdom that fills the thinness of a year or seventy or eighty years, to wisdom spaced out by ages, and coming back at a certain time with strong reinforcements and rich presents and the clear faces of wedding-guests as far as you can look in every direction running gaily toward you? Only the soul is of itself—all else has reference to what ensues. ”

“ A great poem is for ages and ages, in common, and for all degrees and complexions, and all departments and sects, and for a woman as much as a man, and a man as much as a woman. A great poem is no finish to a man or woman, but rather a beginning. Has any one fancied he could sit at last under some due authority, and rest satisfied with explanations, and realise and be content and full? To no such terminus does the greatest poet bring— he brings neither cessation nor sheltered fatness and ease. ”

“ Must not Nature be persuaded many times?
No dainty dolce affettuoso I;
Bearded, sunburnt, gray-necked, forbidding, I have arrived,
To be wrestled with as I pass, for the solid prizes of the universe;
For such I afford whoever can persevere to win them.
17.
On my way a moment I pause;
Here for you! and here for America!
Still the Present I raise aloft—still the Future of the States I harbinge,
glad and sublime;
And for the Past, I pronounce what the air holds of the red aborigines.
The red aborigines! ”

“ The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor, the statesman, the erudite—they are not unappreciated—they fall in their place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. No disguise can pass on it—no disguise can conceal from it. It rejects none, it permits all. Only toward as good as itself and toward the like of itself will it advance half-way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and wealthiest and proudest nation may well go half-way to meet that of its poets. ”

“ Each of us inevitable;
Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth;
Each of us allowed the eternal purports of the earth:
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
12.
You Hottentot with clicking palate! You woolly-haired hordes!
You owned persons, dropping sweat-drops or blood-drops!
You human forms with the fathomless ever-impressive countenances of brutes!
I dare not refuse you—the scope of the world, and of time and space, are
upon me.
You poor koboo whom the meanest of the rest look down upon, for all your
glimmering language and spirituality! ”

“ As if men do not make their mark out of any times! As if the opening of the western continent by discovery, and what has transpired since in North and South America, were less than the small theatre of the antique, or the aimless sleep-walking of the Middle Ages! The pride of the United States leaves the wealth and finesse of the cities, and all returns of commerce and agriculture, and all the magnitude or geography or shows of exterior victory, to enjoy the breed of full-sized men, or one full-sized man unconquerable and simple. ”

“ The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe. He is a seer—he is individual—he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not. He is not one of the chorus—he does not stop for any regulation—he is the President of regulation. What the eyesight does to the rest he does to the rest. Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? ”

“ Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it mostly to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping,
Now I have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for—I awake;
And already a thousand singers—a thousand songs, clearer, louder, and more
sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes, have started to life within me,
Never to die.
O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself—projecting me;
O solitary me, listening—never more shall I cease perpetuating you;
Never more shall I escape, never more, the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me, ”

“ Little or big, learned or unlearned, white or black, legal or illegal, sick or well, from the first inspiration down the windpipe to the last expiration out of it, all that a male or female does that is vigorous and benevolent and clean is so much sure profit to him or her in the unshakable order of the universe and through the whole scope of it for ever. If the savage or felon is wise, it is well—if the greatest poet or savant is wise, it is simply the same—if the President or chief justice is wise, it is the same—if the young mechanic or farmer is wise, it is no more or less. ”

“ With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and
solemn;
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, poured around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—Where amid these you
journey,
With the tolling, tolling bells' perpetual clang;
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.
7.
Nor for you, for one, alone;
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring:
For fresh as the morning—thus would I chant a song for you, O sane and
sacred Death. ”

“ Lo! how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest;
His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere—he colonises the Pacific,
the archipelagoes;
With the steam-ship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale
engines of war,
With these, and the world-spreading factories, he interlinks all geography,
all lands;
—What whispers are these, O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the
seas?
Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?
Is humanity forming en masse?—for lo! tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim ”

“ If peace is the routine, out of him speaks the spirit of peace, large, rich, thrifty, building vast and populous cities, encouraging agriculture and the arts and commerce—lighting the study of man, the soul, immortality—federal, state or municipal government, marriage, health, free-trade, intertravel by land and sea—nothing too close, nothing too far off,—the stars not too far off. In war, he is the most deadly force of the war. ”

“ All expected from heaven or from the highest he is rapport with in the sight of the daybreak, or a scene of the winter woods, or the presence of children playing, or with his arm round the neck of a man or woman. His love, above all love, has leisure and expanse—he leaves room ahead of himself. He is no irresolute or suspicious lover—he is sure—he scorns intervals. His experience and the showers and thrills are not for nothing. Nothing can jar him: suffering and darkness cannot—death and fear cannot. ”

“ GREATNESS. 1.
Great are the myths—I too delight in them;
Great are Adam and Eve—I too look back and accept them;
Great the risen and fallen nations, and their poets, women, sages,
inventors, rulers, warriors, and priests.
Great is Liberty! great is Equality! I am their follower;
Helmsmen of nations, choose your craft! where you sail, I sail,
I weather it out with you, or sink with you.
Great is Youth—equally great is Old Age—great are the Day and Night;
Great is Wealth—great is Poverty—great is Expression—great is Silence. ”

“ Sing from the swamps, the recesses—pour your chant from the bushes;
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.
Sing on, dearest brother—warble your reedy song,
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid, and free, and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul! O wondrous singer!
You only I hear,... yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart;)
Yet the lilac, with mastering odour, holds me. ”

“ Where the banner at daybreak is flapping.
Words! book-words! what are you?
Words no more, for hearken and see,
My song is there in the open air—and I must sing,
With the banner and pennant a-flapping.
I'll weave the chord and twine in,
Man's desire and babe's desire—I'll twine them in, I'll put in life;
I'll put the bayonet's flashing point—I'll let bullets and slugs whizz;
I'll pour the verse with streams of blood, full of volition, full of joy;
Then loosen, launch forth, to go and compete,
With the banner and pennant a-flapping.
BANNER AND PENNANT. Come up here, bard, bard ”

“ Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich
green,
With many a pointed blossom, rising delicate, with the perfume strong I
love,
With every leaf a miracle: and from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-coloured blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig, with its flower, I break.
4.
In the swamp, in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary, the thrush,
The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song:
Song of the bleeding throat! ”

“ I know that what answers for me, an American, must answer for any individual or nation that serves for a part of my materials. Does this answer? or is it without reference to universal needs? or sprung of the needs of the less developed society of special ranks? or old needs of pleasure overlaid by modern science and forms? Does this acknowledge liberty with audible and absolute acknowledgment, and set slavery at nought, for life and death? Will it help breed one good-shaped man, and a woman to be his perfect and independent mate? ”

“ The scout riding on horseback over the plains west of the Mississippi—he ascends a knoll and sweeps his eye around. California life—the miner, bearded, dressed in his rude costume—the staunch California friendship—the sweet air—the graves one, in passing, meets, solitary, just aside the horse-path; Down in Texas, the cotton-field, the negro-cabins—drivers driving mules or oxen before rude carts—cotton-bales piled on banks and wharves. Encircling all, vast-darting, up and wide, the American Soul, with equal hemispheres—one Love, one Dilation or Pride. ”

“ What do you seek, so pensive and silent?
What do you need, Camerado?
Dear son! do you think it is love?
Listen, dear son—listen, America, daughter or son! It is a painful thing to love a man or woman to excess—and yet it satisfies—it is great; But there is something else very great—it makes the whole coincide; It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands, sweeps and provides for all. ”

“ He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling around a helpless thing. As he sees the farthest, he has the most faith. His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things. In the talk on the soul and eternity and God, off of his equal plane, he is silent. He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement: he sees eternity in men and women,—he does not see men and women as dreams or dots. Faith is the antiseptic of the soul,—it pervades the common people and preserves them: they never give up believing and expecting and trusting. ”

“ Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste
with the hasting current;
Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;
Receive the summer sky, you water! and faithfully hold it, till all
downcast eyes have time to take it from you;
Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one's
head, in the sun-lit water;
Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sailed schooners,
sloops, lighters!
Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lowered at sunset;
Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! ”

“ He is the one man who entertains and professes respecting himself the grave conviction that he is the actual and prospective founder of a new poetic literature, and a great one—a literature proportional to the material vastness and the unmeasured destinies of America: he believes that the Columbus of the continent or the Washington of the States was not more truly than himself in the future a founder and upbuilder of this America. Surely a sublime conviction, and expressed more than once in magnificent words—none more so than the lines beginning
"Come, I will make this continent indissoluble." ”

“ Long I roamed the woods of the North—long I watched Niagara pouring;
I travelled the prairies over, and slept on their breast—I crossed the
Nevadas,
I crossed the plateaus;
I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sailed out to sea;
I sailed through the storm, I was refreshed by the storm;
I watched with joy the threatening maws of the waves;
I marked the white combs where they careered so high, curling over;
I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds;
Saw from below what arose and mounted, (O superb! O wild as my heart, and
powerful!) ”