Walt Whitman Quotes

Crezco por igual en las regiones vastas y en las estrechas, crezco por igual entren los negros y los blancos.

Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much, The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion, The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love, The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much, I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther, But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

That you are here — that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

The souls moving along ... are they invisible while the least atom of the stones is visible?

Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best or as good as the best,
In folks nearest to you finding also the sweetest and strongest and lovingest,
Happiness not in another place, but this place... not for another hour, but this hour

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.

Do you know much about Aaron Burr? There's a man, now, who is only damned and damned again in history and yet who had his parts. I have always designed writing something about him to show I did not stand in the jam of his vilifiers. I had a piece on him which should have gone into this book. You don't know (I guess I never told you) that when I was a lad, working in a lawyer's office, it fell to me to go over the river now and then with messages for Burr. Burr was very gentle — persuasive. He had a way of giving me a bit of fruit on these visits — an apple or a pear. I can see him clearly, still — his stateliness, gray hair, courtesy, consideration.

This is the female form, vapor,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heavaen or fear'd of hell, are now consumed, Mad filament, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable...

Lo, the unbounded sea, On its breast a ship starting, spreading all sails, carrying even her moonsails. The pennant is flying aloft as she speeds she speeds so stately — below emulous waves press forward, They surround the ship with shining curving motions and foam. I

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

Loafe with me on the grass.... loose the stop from
your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want.... not custom
or lecture,
not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer
morning;
You settled your head athwart my hips and gently
turned over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and
plunged your
tongue to my barestript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till
you held my
feet.

whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,

When the full-grown poet came,
Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all
its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine;
But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled,
Nay, he is mine alone; — Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand;
And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands,
Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,
And wholly and joyously blends them.