"[From a letter to Walt Whitman written, 1872]
"I have read your poems with my door locked late at night and I have read them on the seashore where I could look all round me and see no more sign of human life than the ships out at sea: and here I often found myself waking up from a reverie with the book open before me. I love all poetry, and high generous thoughts make the tears rush to my eyes, but sometimes a word or a phrase of yours takes me away from the world around me and places me in an ideal land surrounded by realities more than any poem I ever read.

Whitman had a profound influence on me. … He was useful to me in the perfection of form, as a sort of compromise between the strict and the free.

Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.

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.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900.

To You

WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands;
Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true Soul and Body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs — out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem;
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

O I have been dilatory and dumb;
I should have made my way straight to you long ago;
I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.

I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you;
None have understood you, but I understand you;
None have done justice to you — you have not done justice to yourself;
None but have found you imperfect — I only find no imperfection in you;
None but would subordinate you — I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you;
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all;
From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light;
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light;
From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
You have not known what you are — you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life;
Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time;
What you have done returns already in mockeries;
(Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?)

The

Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, / Disorderly fleshy and sensual....eating drinking and breeding, / No sentimentalist....no stander above men and women or apart / from them....no more modest than immodest.

To realize this towering imperative vision in all its integral possibilities... I lived days of anxiety, torture, and delight alike, trembling all over with emotion as those railing[s] in the midst of the bridge vibrating at the continuous passage of the trains. I appealed for help to the soaring verse of Walt Whitman and to the fiery Poe’s plasticity. Upon the swarming darkness of the night, I rung all the bells of alarm with the blaze of electricity scattered in lightnings down the oblique cables, the dynamic pillars of my composition, and to render more pungent the mystery of the metallic apparition, through the green and red glare of the signals I excavated here and there caves as subterranean passages to infernal recesses.

Although this poetry collection was first published in 1855, when Whitman was 36 years old, the poet spent his whole life revising the poems in several editions.

I also got exposed to the poets that were being read at the colleges at that time. The only poetry I had remembered before that time were those horrible, long Longfellow-type things que nos hacían leer in high school [that they made us read in high school]. So I was turned off. But . . . one vato [guy] that I read was doing something that was exciting to me because he seemed to do it with a facility that I could relate to somehow . . . that was Walt Whitman. Me caiba su poesía [I dug his poetry] so I went with his trip for a long time. By then I was also starting to read T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Welshman Dylan Thomas. Y me fui prendiendo con esos vatos [and I got attached to those guys]. And the other vato that I really dug a lot around that same time was William Carlos Williams. I also thought he was getting away with something. And I thought all these guys were getting away with something I was being told not to do. Por eso los veía como rebels a ellos. [That's why I saw them as rebels.] How could they get away with it and I get put down for trying it.

Many great writers inspired me, of course, but inspiration is not the same as a direct influence. I was often stirred by the beauty of great prose, the passion and startling intensity of hard-won truths, which leapt from that creative fire. … For the writer, therefore the reader, fresh truth is exhilarating, even painful truth, as in Kafka or Céline. Isn’t that what good writing finally arrives at? The insights and epigrams of Alexander Pope weren’t clichés when he wrote them, any more than those resounding lines in Shakespeare. They only became dog-eared from overuse.

Influence is strange. Because one can be influenced powerfully in every way but technique. For instance, 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.

I drew a lot of nourishment from the poets that I then was aware of and able to be aware of, poets like William Blake, like Emily Dickinson, like Whitman, people whose—and then later, somewhat later, Yeats, who taught me in fact that poetry could be political and still be incredibly beautiful. And on and on, because one is always reading, one is always extending one’s range into the world of poetry translated from other languages, poetry from other centuries. (1997)

Walt Whitman said, “To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Be composed — be at ease with me — I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as Nature, Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you, Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.