Quotes About Whitman

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

He [President Abraham Lincoln] has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep-cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Whitman believed himself, at the time when Drum-Taps was published, that it was so far the best thing he had written. It certainly contained the best poetry that was written during the war on the subject

One of my favorite passages in 'Leaves of Grass,' that breathless, exuberant poem so rich and full of innocence and joy and generosity and compassion, is 'Mannahatta.'

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

The type of mind of Whitman's, which seldom or never emerges as a mere mentality, an independent thinking and knowing faculty, but always as a personality, always as a complete human entity, never can expound itself, because its operations are synthetic and not analytic; its mainspring is love and not mere knowledge.

His chosen medium—writing—had, he believed, a high potential for holding America together. America was a nation of readers, known worldwide for its high literacy rates. At midcentury, a full 90 percent of white American adults could read, as opposed to about 60 percent in England. Whitman crowed hyperbolically: "In regard to intelligence, education, knowledge, the masses of [English] people, in comparison with the masses of the U.S., are at least two hundred years behind us.

She drank the rest of the tea, still reeling from Whitman's words. Then the harp began to play---lustily, with stirring effect, seeming to fancy itself an entire symphony---"Ode to Joy.

On July 25, 1943, the day Mussolini fell, I was with Luce trying to shake off his objection to a long essay I had written for Fortune's philosophy series on the vision of democracy according to Emerson, Melville, Whitman.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

Like Twain, Walt Whitman was mesmerized by Grant and grouped him with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the quartet of greatest Americans. "In all Homer and Shakespeare there is no fortune or personality really more picturesque or rapidly changing, more full of heroism, pathos, contrast," he wrote.

James and Whitman are unlike not in quality but in kind, and in their very opposition they serve to complement each other. But the difference between James and Dreiser is not of kind, for both men addressed themselves to virtually the same social and moral fact. The difference here is one of quality, and perhaps nothing is more typical of American liberalism than the way it has responded to the respective qualities of the two men.

Since the diagnosis, Sylvie had returned to Leaves of Grass. She wanted to absorb Whitman's optimistic take on death; she wanted to share the poet's open mind about what came next. Whenever Sylvie felt a quiver of fear, she repeated to herself the line: And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

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?

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines.

Vonnegut is one of America's basic artists, a true and worthy heir to the grand tradition of Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, Dreiser, Traven, Tom Wolfe (the real Tom Wolfe, I mean) and Steinbeck. In other words, he writes out of a concern for justice, love, honesty, and hope.

The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.

I must revert again to the perpetual theme: in the criticism of Melville & Whitman, and even Poe, Lawrence revealed a magnificent force, an understanding beyond all criticism heretofore known. The roughness & simplicity, the apparent laziness of it is disarming. Underneath tho' a terrible power & penetration.)

I expected to include plenty of Whitman here and discovered, reading him, a sort of seasickness at all those undulating lines of Uncle Walt's perpetual swoon over grass and leaves and camerados. There are good poems there, and it's a mistake to omit them, but Walt is the Typhoid Mary of American Lit: so much bad poetry can be traced back to him (and not brief bad poems, either), he gave so many dreadful writers permission to lavish themselves upon us. Lord, forgive me.

I think Whitman more than any other poet possessed the gift of revealing to others the beauty of everything around us, the beauty of nature, the beauty of human beings.