Walt Whitman

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



 * 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

'''Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.'''
 * 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.
 * Complete Prose Works (1892), III. Notes Left Over 3. Ventures, on an Old Theme, p.324

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)



 * I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love.
 * Starting from Paumanok, 6


 * I say the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion.
 * ''Starting from Paumanok. 7


 * I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake.
 * ''Starting from Paumanok. 7


 * None has begun to think how divine he himself is and how certain the future is.
 * ''Starting from Paumanok. 7


 * Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
 * ''Starting from Paumanok. 12


 * I loafe and invite my soul.
 * Song of Myself, 1


 * I have no mockings or arguments; I witness and wait.
 * Song of Myself, 4


 * In the faces of men and women I see God.
 * Song of Myself, 48


 * I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
 * Song of Myself, 52


 * I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-beloved, saying to the people, "Do not weep for me, This is not my true country, I have lived banished from my true country—I now go back there, I return to the celestial sphere where every one goes in his turn."
 * Salut au Monde, 6


 * Each of us inevitable; Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth.
 * Salut au Monde, 11


 * The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman.
 * Song of the Broad-Axe


 * In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection.
 * Song of the Universal, 1


 * All, all for immortality, Love like the light silently wrapping all.
 * Song of the Universal, 4


 * Youth, large, lusty, loving—Youth, full of grace, force, fascination! Do you know that Old Age may come after you, with equal grace, force, fascination?
 * Youth, Day, Old Age and Night


 * Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality, And the vast that is evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.
 * Roaming in Thought, 1


 * Thunder on! Stride on! Democracy. Strike with vengeful stroke!
 * Drum-Taps. Rise O Days from your fathomless Deep, 3


 * O Banner! Not houses of peace are you, nor any nor all of their prosperity; if need be you shall have every one of those houses to destroy them; You thought not to destroy those valuable houses, standing fast, full of comfort, built with money; May they stand fast then? Not an hour, unless you, above them and all, stand fast.
 * Drum-Taps. Song of the Banner at Daybreak


 * Over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, studded with the eternal stars.
 * Drum-Taps. Bivouac on a Mountain-side


 * Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling!
 * Drum-Taps. Give me the splendid Silent Sun


 * Lo! the moon ascending! Up from the East, the silvery round moon; Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon; Immense and silent moon.
 * Drum-Taps. Dirge for Two Veterans


 * Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world.
 * Drum-Taps. Reconciliation


 * When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed, And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night, I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
 * Memories of President Lincoln, 1


 * Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later, delicate death.
 * Memories of President Lincoln, 14


 * Praised be the fathomless universe For life and joy and for objects and knowledge curious; And for love, sweet love—But praise! O praise and praise For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.
 * Memories of President Lincoln, 14


 * O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done! The ship has weathered every wrack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.
 * Memories of President Lincoln. O Captain! my Captain!


 * Liberty is to be subserved, whatever occurs.
 * To a Foiled European Revolutionaire


 * Peace is always beautiful.
 * The Sleepers, 7


 * What do you suppose will satisfy the soul except to walk free and own no superior?
 * Laws for Creations


 * To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
 * Miracles


 * I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited; I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.
 * Night on the Prairies


 * I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.
 * Night on the Prairies


 * I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!
 * To think of Time, 9


 * The paths to the house I seek to make, But leave to those to come the house itself.
 * Thou Mother with thy Equal Brood, 1


 * Society waits unformed and is between things ended and things begun.
 * Thoughts, 1


 * Now obey thy cherished secret wish, Embrace thy friends—leave all in order; To port and hawser's tie no more returning, Depart upon thy endless cruise, old Sailor!
 * Now Finalè to the Shore (To Tennyson)


 * I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed; I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold, And I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation.
 * So Long!

Disputed

 * Be curious, not judgmental.
 * While consistently attributed to Whitman, this popular motivational quote has no source. It is occasionally listed as occurring in Leaves of Grass, but the closest phrase found in that collection is "Be not curious about God."


 * I see great things in baseball, It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism, tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set, repair those losses and be a blessing to us.
 * This has been widely attributed to Whitman, and no one else, but without definite source. It has sometimes been cited as being from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (sometimes with a date of 23 July 1846), where Whitman had been an editor, but its presence on that date is not apparent in the online historical archives of that publication.
 * Brian Cronin, in "Did 'Bull Durham' misquote Walt Whitman on baseball?", Los Angeles Times (28 March 2012), suggests that this is (loosely) paraphrased from a remark of September 1888 reported in Horace L. Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Vol. 2:
 * I like your interest in sports ball, chiefest of all base-ball particularly: base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a necessary physical stoicism. We are some ways a dyspeptic, nervous set: anything which will repair such losses may be regarded as a blessing to the race. We want to go out and howl, swear, run, jump, wrestle, even fight, if only by so doing we may improve the guts of the people: the guts, vile as guts are, divine as guts are!
 * "Sports for a Dyspeptic Race", Intimate With Walt: Whitmans Conversataions With Horace Traubel, p. 261


 * Yes, Mexico must be thoroughly chastised! Let our arms now be carried with a spirit which shall teach the world that, while we are not forward for a quarrel, American knows how to crush, as well as expand!
 * Editorial comment identified as from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (11 May 1846)

Misattributed

 * Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.
 * This has become attributed to both Walt Whitman and Helen Keller, but has not been found in either of their published works, and variations of the quote are listed as a proverb commonly used in both the US and Canada in A Dictionary of American Proverbs (1992), edited by Wolfgang Mieder, Kelsie B. Harder and Stewart A. Kingsbury.

Quotes about Whitman



 * Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn.
 * Paula Gunn Allen The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986)


 * I rank Muriel Rukeyser with Walt Whitman, the essential American poet, democratic at the level of hope.
 * Dorothy Allison, blurb for The Life of Poetry (1949)


 * 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


 * the contributions of people whom we may now identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender are integral and central to how we conceptualize our national history. Without the work of social activists, thinkers, writers, and artists such as We'Wha, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Martha "Calamity" Jane Cannary Burke, Edith Guerrier, Countee Cullen, Ethel Waters, Bayard Rustin, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cherrie Moraga, and Lily Tomlin, we would not have the country that we have today.
 * Michael Bronski A Queer History of the United States (2011)


 * 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.


 * The populist poet of Jacksonian democracy, Walt Whitman, sang the song of manhood and the Anglo-American super race that had been steeled through empire. As an enthusiastic supporter of the US war against Mexico in 1846, Whitman proposed the stationing of sixty thousand US troops in Mexico in order to establish a regime change there "whose efficiency and permanency shall be guaranteed by the United States. This will bring out enterprise, open the way for manufacturers and commerce, into which the immense dead capital of the country [Mexico] will find its way."2 Whitman explicitly grounded this prescription in racism: "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history.... A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." The whole world would benefit from US expansion: "We pant to see our country and its rule far-reaching. What has miserable, inefficient Mexico... to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?" In September 1846, when General Zachary Taylor's troops captured Monterrey, Whitman hailed it as "another clinching proof of the indomitable energy of the Anglo-Saxon character" Whitman's sentiments reflected the established US origin myth that had the frontier settlers replacing the Native peoples as historical destiny, adding his own theoretical twist of what would later be called social Darwinism.
 * Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014)


 * Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion of Mexico were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists. Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely supported it or opposed it. Whitman, a supporter, was also enamored of the violent Indian- and Mexican-killing Texas Rangers. Whitman saw the war as bolstering US self-respect and believed that a "true American" would be unable to resist "this pride in our victorious armies."
 * Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014)


 * 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)


 * The whole world has given heroic figures to humanity, who in the face of persecution and obloquy have lived and fought for their right and the right of mankind to free and unstinted expression. America has the distinction of having contributed a large quota of native-born children who have most assuredly not lagged behind. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Voltairine de Cleyre...Moses Harman...Horace Traubel...and quite an array of other brave souls have expressed themselves in keeping with their vision of a new social order based on freedom from every form of coercion. True, the price they had to pay was high. They were deprived of most of the comforts society offers to ability and talent, but denies when they will not be subservient. But whatever the price, their lives were enriched beyond the common lot.
 * Emma Goldman "Was My Life Worth Living?" (1934)


 * I had started reading Marx and Lenin, but at that point I think Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau had more effect on me. What I responded to in my readings were emotional rather than theoretical questions. I was developing a hatred of the brutality of the existing economic system, a hatred of the impersonal degradation of human beings. That's what moved me as a teenager, and stayed with me.
 * Dorothy Ray Healey California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party (1990)


 * 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


 * Walt Whitman; I love his poetry.
 * Mariame Kaba, We Do This Til We Free Us (2021)


 * 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


 * I mean to carry on in the tradition of Walt Whitman. Whitman says, "I sing the body electric" and "I sing the body from top to toe." He writes about his goal of celebrating the modern man as he calls it, and he sings the American self.
 * 1989 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)


 * I felt some really exciting things were happening with the language in the Sixties because people were finding that vocabulary for psychedelic states or visions or social action. But as I was working with that language, I saw too how it had its roots a hundred years ago in Whitman. So if it goes back a hundred years to Whitman, then it goes back thirty more to Poe. I feel very much in that tradition, showing people how 1960 was using language of the 1860s. Because we don't remember. Walt Whitman said, "Look to the East, that's also your motherland." He already had that idea that our myths are not just from Europe, but from Asia. So I'm saying, "Look at Asia," because we already know that we come from Europe. For a long time when we say classical, we meant Greek and Roman. And I'm saying, "Look, there's more classics, more."
 * 1989 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)


 * I like the freedom that Walt Whitman was using to play with and shape the American language. Especially in writing Tripmaster Monkey-I just lifted lines from Leaves of Grass. You would think they were modern Sixties' slang-"Trippers and Askers" and "Linguists and Contenders Surround Me"-all of that-"Song of the Open Road," "Song of Occupations"-I just took those for title headings for my book. I like the rhythm of his language and the freedom and the wildness of it. It's so American. And also his vision of a new kind of human being that was going to be formed in this country-although he never specifically said Chinese-ethnic Chinese also I'd like to think he meant all kinds of people. And also I love that throughout Leaves of Grass he always says "men and women," "male and female." He's so different from other writers of his time, and even of this time. Even a hundred years ago he always included women and he always used [those phrases], "men and women," "male and female."
 * 1990 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)


 * 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


 * Walt was always working on the same book/First edition did not/have his name on cover/He reviewed himself in newspapers anonymously/quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson/without permission/on the spine/Emerson was not thrilled/Take a breath/Full breath/That's what I call a poet
 * Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air (2018)


 * Anyone can visit Walt Whitman's birthing corner on/Long Island./The guide points and says, There, right there, he was/born./Some visitors can't move on quickly/to the next room./They are hypnotized./What if Walt had never left this corner or stepped out/into the streets/to do and say all he did?/Then who would we be?
 * Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air (2018)


 * When Whitman in Song of Myself wrote "Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this touches a man, and "What I assume you shall assume," he articulated an abiding impulse latent within all poetry. The women's poetry movement today is a carrier of that same impulse and makes it possible for us to "assume" more than we did before.
 * Alicia Ostriker Epilogue to Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (1986)


 * I read a lot. In poetry, I liked W. H. Auden more than anyone. I loved British writers and the novels I grew up with, Twain, Dickens, and so on. I was not influenced say by Walt Whitman or anyone like that. His freedom was not my freedom, and so it didn’t affect me.
 * Grace Paley Interview with Poets & Writers (2008)


 * 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 is a "bad influence"; that is, he cannot be imitated.
 * Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)


 * 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


 * When I read the poetry of Walt Whitman, I could understand why he answered the question, “Do I contradict myself?" with "Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."
 * Cornel West Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir (2009)