It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess.

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American journalist and poet, most famous for his lifelong work on his book Leaves of Grass.

See also: Leaves of Grass

Quotes

I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.

• It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess. Who would not mourn that an ample palace, of surpassingly graceful architecture, fill’d with luxuries, and embellish’d with fine pictures and sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant, and never be known or enjoy’d by its owner? Would such a fact as this cause your sadness? Then be sad. For there is a palace, to which the courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a frivolous patch, and, though it is always waiting for them, not one of its owners ever enters there with any genuine sense of its grandeur and glory.
  I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.
  • "Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)" (1839); later delivered as a lecture at the Brooklyn Art Union (31 March 1851) and printed in the Brooklyn Daily Advertizer (3 April 1851)

• Talk not so much, then, young artist, of the great old masters, who but painted and chisell’d. Study not only their productions. There is a still higher school for him who would kindle his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest and purest art. It is the school of all grand actions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the death of patriots and martyrs — of all the mighty deeds written in the pages of history — deeds of daring, and enthusiasm, devotion, and fortitude.
  • "Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)" (1839)

• This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured . . . . others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches . . . . and shall master all attachment.
  • From the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass

• In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing "base", a certain game of ball ... Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms ... the game of ball is glorious.
  • Comments on baseball in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (23 July 1846), as quoted in Walt Whitman Looks at the Schools (1950) by Florence Bernstein Freedman, p. 126-127

• I have just this moment heard from the front — there is nothing yet of a movement, but each side is continually on the alert, expecting something to happen.
  O Mother, to think that we are to have here soon what I have seen so many times, the awful loads and trains and boatloads of poor, bloody, and pale and wounded young men again — for that is what we certainly will, and before very long. I see all the little signs, getting ready in the hospitals, etc.; it is dreadful when one thinks about it. I sometimes think over the sights I have myself seen: the arrival of the wounded after a battle, and the scenes on the field, too, and I can hardly believe my own recollections. What an awful thing war is! Mother, it seems not men but a lot of devils and butchers butchering each other.
  • Letter to his mother (22 March 1864)

• Looking over my scraps, I find I wrote the following during 1864. The happening to our America, abroad as well as at home, these years, is indeed most strange. The democratic republic has paid her to-day the terrible and resplendent compliment of the united wish of all the nations of the world that her union should be broken, her future cut off, and that she should be compell’d to descend to the level of kingdoms and empires ordinarily great. There is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the United States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember’d by it. There is not one but would help toward that dismemberment, if it dared. […] Are we indignant? alarm’d? Do we feel jeopardized? No; help’d, braced, concentrated, rather. We are all too prone to wander from ourselves, to affect Europe, and watch her frowns and smiles. We need this hot lesson of general hatred, and henceforth must never forget it. Never again will we trust the moral sense nor abstract friendliness of a single government of the old world.
  • "Attitude of Foreign Governments During the War", The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman (1892), volume 1, part I: Specimen Days.

• We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake.
  • "The Spanish Element in Our Nationality," letter to the Philadelphia Press (20 July 1883), later published in The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman (1892), part V: November Boughs

• Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated.

• There was a kind of labor agitator here today—a socialist, or something like that: young, a rather beautiful boy — full of enthusiasms: the finest type of the man in earnest about himself and about life. I was sorry to see him come: I am somehow afraid of agitators, though I believe in agitation: but I was more sorry to see him go than come. Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated. … Cheer! cheer! Is there anything better in this world anywhere than cheer — just cheer? Any religion better? — any art? Just cheer!
  • Conversation with Whitman (16 May 1888) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) by Horace Traubel, Vol. I

• I find I'm a good deal more of a socialist than I thought I was: maybe not technically, politically, so, but intrinsically, in my meanings.
  • Conversation with Whitman (July 16 1888) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) by Horace Traubel, Vol. II

• I said: "Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!" He was hilarious: "That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life."
  • Conversation with Whitman (4 July 1889) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) by Horace Traubel, Vol. IV

• If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere — probably more than the rest of the world combined.
  Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations.
  To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
  • Complete Prose Works (1892), III. Notes Left Over 3. Ventures, on an Old Theme, p.324

Quotes about Whitman

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world. ~ Randall Jarrell

Whitman’s masterpiece, his whole vision, is exactly about this: life as a quest for truth, love, beauty, goodness, and freedom; life as the art of becoming human through the cultivation of the human soul. ~ Rob Riemen

• Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both—as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

• Whitman...a man full-blooded and brotherly, unselfconscious in his democracy and genuinely at ease with all kinds and classes.
  • Gerald Bullett, "Walt Whitman", in Alfred Barratt Brown, Great Democrats, 1934.

• I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "LEAVES OF GRASS." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
  I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.
  I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging…
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a letter to Whitman, thanking him for a copy of Leaves of Grass (21 July 1855)

• I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.
  • Gerard Manley Hopkins, in a letter to Robert Bridges (18 October 1882)

• One Whitman is miracle enough, and when he comes again it will be the end of the world.
  • Randall Jarrell, in "Some Lines from Whitman" in Poetry and the Age (1953), p. 119

• I know the formal element in Walt Whitman's poetry found and enormous echo throughout the world. Yet Walt Whitman's significance lies elsewhere. He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization which are apparently either contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena. He said: "Living is the little that is left over from dying." so he gave his whole heart to every leaf of grass. I admire in him the reconciliation of art and nature. When the war between the Northern and Southern States in America, which first really set in motion the power of our present machine world, first broke out, Walt Whitman became a medical orderly. He did what all of us ought to do, particularly today. He helped the weak, the sick and the defeated. He was a Christian and–with a close affinity to us Jews–he was therefore an important measure of the status and worth of humanity.
  • Franz Kafka qtd. in Gustav Janouch Conversations with Kafka (1971), p. 167

• Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line
  Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine;
  Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace,
  And copies Ovid's filth without his grace.
  In his rough brain a genius might have grown,
  Had he not sought to play the brute alone;
  But void of shame, he let his wit run wild,
  And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child.
  Averse to culture, strange to humankind,
  He never knew the pleasures of the mind.
  Scorning the pure, the delicate, the clean,
  His joys were sordid, and his morals mean.
  Thro' his gross thoughts a native vigour ran,
  From which he deem'd himself the perfect man:
  But want of decency his rank decreas'd,
  And sunk him to the level of the beast.
  Would that his Muse had dy'd before her birth,
  Nor spread such foul corruption o'er the earth.
  • H. P. Lovecraft, in an "Essay on Modern Poets" this was published as a "Fragment on Whitman” in The Ancient Track (2001) edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 192

• I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman — I have detested you long enough.
  • Ezra Pound, "A Pact"

• Whitman’s masterpiece, his whole vision, is exactly about this: life as a quest for truth, love, beauty, goodness, and freedom; life as the art of becoming human through the cultivation of the human soul.
  • Rob Riemen, recalling a conversation with Joseph Goodman, Nobility of Spirit : A Forgotten Ideal (2008), p. xxvii

• Whitman to me is the most fascinating of American poets. Whitman started to write the great poetry from scratch after he had written all that junk for newspapers, the sentimental lyrical poems. All of a sudden he wrote Leaves of Grass. When I was teaching at the University of Nebraska, my friend James Miller was chairman of the English Department. He wrote the first book attempting to make a parallel between the structure of Leaves of Grass and the steps of the mystical experience as in St. John of the Cross. I was completely bowled over by this, not having been able to explain how Whitman came to write “Song of Myself,” which is unlike anything not only in American literature, but unique in all the world. The parallels to it are mystical literature. Miller tried to show that there was actual evidence for this kind of experience, which evidently happens at a particular moment in someone’s life. … When I saw the negative reaction to Whitman with the great ruling critics of the time, I couldn’t believe it. Eliot never really gave up hammering away on Whitman, neither did Pound. Although Pound makes little concessions. Whitman, you know, didn’t have any influence in this country until Allen Ginsberg came along.
  • Karl Shapiro, in "Karl Shapiro, The Art of Poetry No. 36", interviewed by Robert Phillips in Paris Review No. 99 (Spring 1986)

• I would think Walt Whitman probably had more influence on my whole poetic thinking than anybody, but I never dreamed of trying to write in the Whitman manner.
  • Karl Shapiro, in "Karl Shapiro, The Art of Poetry No. 36", interviewed by Robert Phillips in Paris Review No. 99 (Spring 1986)

• When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself.
  • Karel Appel, as quoted in ‘Karel Appel – the complete sculptures’, eds. Harry de Visser / Roland Hagenberg, Edition Lafayette, New York 1990, p. 93

External links

• Whitman Hypertext Archives + Revised Mainpage
• Several Editions of Leaves of Grass Online and additional materials
• Project Gutenberg e-Text of Leaves of Grass
• Selected Poems from Leaves of Grass
• Prose Works (1892) online at Bartleby
• "Walt Whitman on Baseball"