Tao Te Ching
Photo: Mathew Brady
Walt Whitman
1819 – 1892 CE
Premier "poet of democracy" and model for Dracula
“Father of free verse,” one of the most influential American poets, humanist, journalist, Civil War volunteer nurse; Whitman blended realism and transcendentalism and became known as the first "poet of democracy.” His most famous work, Leaves of Grass, was called everything from "trashy, profane & obscene, the author a pretentious ass" to a work more central to American culture than Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and Emerson's The Conduct of Life. Vociferously criticized for being obscene with sexuality themes, it was admired by Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Oscar Wilde. Though biographers assert that Whitman was gay, he always denied it and claimed to have 6 illegitimate children. In a contrast between his poetry and personal views, he promoted equality and true democracy in the former, status quo views of nationalism and racism in the latter. His poetic and vagabond lifestyle inspired the Beat movement, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Dylan, and Bram Stoker who used him as the model for his character, Dracula.
Lineages
American (USA) Humanism Poets
Eras
Western
Romantacism (1800 – 1850 CE)Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)
Gilded Age (1860 – 1900 CE)
Victorian (1837 – 1901 CE)
American Civil War (1861 – 1865 CE)
Chinese
Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912 CE)Sources
Unlisted Sources
Democratic Vistas (1870)
Democtratic Vistsa (1870)
Song of Myself, Part 52
Song of the Broad-Axe
To the States
Quotes by Walt Whitman (36 quotes)
“The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”
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“You are either to abolish slavery or it will abolish you”
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“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
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“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
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“Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.”
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“Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul.”
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“I adopt each theory, myth, god, and demi-god, I see that all the old accounts, bibles, genealogies, are true, without exception”
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“To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.”
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“Happiness, not in another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour.”
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“I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserved my friends.”
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“I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
from Song of Myself, Part 52
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“Come Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia...
I heard that you asked for something to prove this puzzle, the New World,
And to define America, her athletic democracy;
Therefore I send you my poems”
from Leaves of Grass
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“Behold a woman! The old face of the mother of many children, clearer and more beautiful than the sky. The sun just shines on her old white head. The melodious character of the earth, the finish beyond which philosophy cannot go and does not wish to go, the justified mother of men”
from Leaves of Grass
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“O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done…
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.”
from Leaves of Grass
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“We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering... these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love... these are what we stay alive for.”
from Leaves of Grass
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“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”
from Leaves of Grass
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“Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light
and of every moment of your life”
from Leaves of Grass
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“If life and the soul are sacred, the human body is sacred;
And in man or woman, a clean strong firmfibred body is beautiful as the most beautiful face...
Who degrades or defiles the living human body is cursed”
from Leaves of Grass
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“In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.”
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“lighting up our 19th Century with the light of a powerful, penetrating and perfectly honest intellect of the first-class”
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“The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertness and fossilism making so large a part of human institutions.”
from Democtratic Vistsa (1870)
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“Out of every fruition of success, no matter what, comes forth something to make a new effort necessary.”
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“I am the sword poet of every dauntless rebel the world over.”
from Song of the Broad-Axe
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“There is no greater fallacy on earth than the doctrine of force”
from To the States
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“The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.”
from Leaves of Grass
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“In business, the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magican's serpent, remaining today sole master... saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration”
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“The great poems, Shakespeare's included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy.”
from Democratic Vistas (1870)
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“democracy is only of use [when] it may pass on and come to its power and fruit in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs... democracy in all public and private life”
from Democratic Vistas (1870)
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“Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures”
from Leaves of Grass
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“Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no discouragement.”
from Leaves of Grass
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“I know nothing more rare than a reverent appreciation of the People—of their measureless wealth of latent worth and capacity, their vast, artistic contrasts of lights and shades... far surpassing all the vaunted samples of book-heroes in all the records of the world.”
from Democratic Vistas (1870)
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“Singing the Song of prostitutes... Singing the song of procreation... singing what, to the soul, entirely redeem'd her, the faithful one, even the prostitute, who detain'd me when I went to the city”
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Quotes about Walt Whitman (8 quotes)
“Only a robust mind like that of Walt Whitman who was not inflicted with the scientific spirit and who was in close touch with life itself and with the great humanity could retain that enormous love and enormous faith in the common man.”
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“If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States but none of those are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.”
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“a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light... the saints, the arhats, the bodhisattvas, the jivanmuktas who knew something or everything about this state of being... we wanted you to know who and what Jesus and Gautama and Lao Tzu and Shankaracharya and Huineng and Sri Ramakrishna, etc., were before you knew too much or anything about Homer or Shakespeare or even Blake or Whitman, let alone George Washington and his cherry tree... or how to parse a sentence”
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“Whitman’s breakthru from official conventional nationalist identity to personal self, to subject, subjectivity, to candor of person, sacredness of the unique eccentric curious solitary personal consciousness changed written imaginative conception of the individual around the whole world, and inspired a democratic revolution of mental nature from Leningrad and Paris to Shanghai and Tokyo.”
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“Even America, so crass and young, can produce a poet unique and among the best… It was a great revolution in the history of literature when a man appeared who saw the elements of poetry, the scene of the human drama, in the very life about him; who found a way to put into song the spirit of the pioneer, and who saw that there was more poetry out under the stars than in all the salons of an unnatural life… And so truly did he see and sing that at last he became not only the poet of democracy and America, but, by the greatness of his soul and the universality of his vision, the poet of the modern world.”
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“Whitman proposes something deeper: he proposes the work of understanding; and, in preparation for understanding, the work of feeling the present need and the future obligation.”
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