Quotes About Poetry

re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and 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. [From the preface to Leaves Grass]

Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Devote your income and labor to others... And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems

Simplicity is the glory of expression.

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

Quédate hoy conmigo, vive conmigo un día y una noche y te mostraré el origen de todos los poemas.

Sun so generous it shall be you- Leaves of Grass

Human bodies are words, myriads of words; In the best poems reappears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped,         natural, gay;

O baffled, baulked, bent to the very earth, Oppressed with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that, amid all the blab whose echoes recoil upon me, I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, But that before all my insolent poems, the real ME stands yet untouched, untold, altogether unreached, Withdrawn

And your very flesh shall be a great poem

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry

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

The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

I swear I see what is better than to tell the best, It is always to leave the best untold. -from A Song of the Rolling Earth

But a cluster containing night's darkness and blood-dripping wounds, And psalms of the dead.

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.

O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys! To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap, roll on, float on! To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports, A ship itself, (see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air,) A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys.

The words of true poems are the tuft and final applause of science.

Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets

Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.

With the sentiment of the stars and moon such nights I get all the free margins and indefiniteness of music or poetry, fused in geometry's utmost exactness.