Walt Whitman (1819–92) was an American poet who pioneered a distinctive open poetic form and an overpowering voice that shaped 20th century-American poetry.
Whitman was born on Long Island, New York. His father was a farmer and carpenter. When Walter was four, his family moved to adjacent Brooklyn, then a small city. He embraced the city and the country equally. Whitman worked as a journalist in Brooklyn and often rambled around the streets of New York people-watching and searching for story ideas.
Whitman started writing poetry when America went into the Civil War. He self-published Leaves of Grass (1855) and arranged for it to be sold in different formats, at different prices, to reach as broad an audience as possible. His original form, subject, and overt sensuality received widespread disparagement in the conservative society of his day. Despite his best efforts, Whitman sold only ten copies of the first edition and gave away the rest. He sent out copies to several prominent writers and critics. Only a few answered him; Ralph Waldo Emerson responded positively and said, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”
For the rest of his life, Whitman expanded and revised the poems in Leaves of Grass. The verses that ultimately made him a literary celebrity were the poems he composed on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, “Oh Captain My Captain” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
The nine editions of Leaves of Grass form a single all-encompassing epic poetic sequence. In it, Whitman embraced a range of sentiments—concerning optimism of America’s prospects to an increasing tragic tone about the Civil War.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Walt Whitman
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: The Military
To me every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Optimism, Miracles
Produce great men, the rest follows.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Example
The female that loves unrequited sleeps,
And the male that loves unrequited sleeps,
The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps,
And the enraged and treacherous dispositions, all, all sleep.
—Walt Whitman
Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gathered, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!)
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Parties
Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Truth
I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the The Past triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American national election.
—Walt Whitman
I never could explain why I love anybody, or anything.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Love
A child said, “What is the grass?” fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? … I do not know what it is any more than he.
—Walt Whitman
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Gardening, Flowers
Nothing endures but personal qualities.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Character
I exist as I am, that is enough, If no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Awareness, Acceptance, Mindfulness, Realization
This dust was once the man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of these States.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Death
They do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Animals
I see the President almost every day. I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face with its deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Presidency
I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God – I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.
—Walt Whitman
The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual – namely to You.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Self-Discovery, Humanity, Humankind
The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Character, City Life, Cities
Henceforth I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune.
—Walt Whitman
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Old Age, Age, Aging
In the broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed perfection.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Earth
It is only the novice in political economy who thinks it is the duty of government to make its citizens happy. Government has no such office. To protect the weak and the minority from the impositions of the strong and the majorityto prevent any one from positively working to render the people unhappy, to do the labor not of an officious inter-meddler in the affairs of men, but of a prudent watchman who prevents outragethese are rather the proper duties of a government. Under the specious pretext of effecting the happiness of the whole community, nearly all the wrongs and intrusions of government have been carried through. The legislature may, and should, when such things fall in its way, lend its potential weight to the cause of virtue and happinessbut to legislate in direct behalf of those objects is never available, and rarely effects any even temporary benefit.
—Walt Whitman
The powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Life
Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Graduation, One liners
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Confidence
There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Little Things, Things
How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Argument
I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Democracy
What a devil art thou, Poverty! How many desires—how many aspirations after goodness and truth—how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause!
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Poverty, The Poor
I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserved my friends.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Enemy, Friendship, Enemies
And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future, and I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn’d to beautiful results, and I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death, and I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact, and that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.
—Walt Whitman
Simplicity is the glory of expression.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: One liners, Simplicity, Value of a Day, Time Management
I cannot too often repeat that Democracy is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Democracy
The Past—the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Past, Time, The Past
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Beauty, Flowers
Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?
—Walt Whitman
Topics: People
I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease… observing a spear of summer grass.
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Loneliness
O lands! O all so dear to me—what you are, I become part of that, whatever it is.
—Walt Whitman
Have you learned lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who rejected you, and braced themselves against you, or disputed the passage with you?
—Walt Whitman
Topics: Opposition, Learning
The city fireman-the fire that suddenly bursts forth in the close-pack’d square,
The arriving engines, the hoarse shouts, the nimble stepping and daring,
The strong command through the fire-trumpets, the falling in line,
the rise and fall of the arms forcing the water,
The slender, spasmic, blue-white jets-the bringing to bear of the hooks and ladders, and their execution,
The crash and cut away of connecting wood-work, or through floors, if the fire smoulders under them,
The crowd with their lit faces, watching-the glare and dense shadows;….
—Walt Whitman
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Ralph Waldo Emerson American Philosopher
Henry David Thoreau American Philosopher
Edna St. Vincent Millay American Poet
Gore Vidal American Novelist
James Russell Lowell American Poet, Critic
Christopher Morley American Novelist, Essayist
Natalie Clifford Barney American Playwright
John Jay Chapman American Biographer
Herman Melville American Novelist
Gertrude Stein American Writer