Poems by Walt Whitman

by Walt Whitman

Mr. John Burroughs, author of Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, published quite recently in New York. His thorough-paced admirers declare Whitman to be beyond rivalry the poet of the epoch; an estimate which, startling as it will sound at the first, may nevertheless be upheld, on the grounds that Whitman is beyond all his competitors a man of the period, one of audacious personal ascendant, incapable of all compromise, and an initiator in the scheme and form of his works.

Certain faults are charged against him, and, as far as they are true, shall frankly stand confessed—some of them as very serious faults. Firstly, he speaks on occasion of gross things in gross, crude, and plain terms. Secondly, he uses some words absurd or ill-constructed, others which produce a jarring effect in poetry, or indeed in any lofty literature. Thirdly, he sins from time to time by being obscure, fragmentary, and agglomerative—giving long strings of successive and detached items, not, however, devoid of a certain primitive effectiveness.

his self- assertion is boundless; yet not always to be understood as strictly or merely personal to himself, but sometimes as vicarious, the poet speaking on behalf of all men, and every man and woman. These

It’s like they blame the poetry for its esoteric nature. Surely Whitman wasn’t the first to be obscure as to the specifics.

The book, then, taken as a whole, is the poem both of Personality and of Democracy; and, it may be added, of American nationalism. It is par excellence the modern poem. It is distinguished also by this peculiarity— that in it the most literal view of things is continually merging into the most rhapsodic or passionately abstract.

The conceptions are throughout those of a man in robust health, and might alter much under different conditions.

Should we all be so lucky.

show is in a measure spectral and unsubstantial, and the mask of a larger and profounder reality beneath it, of

other exceptional point. If the reader wishes

difficult to find anywhere a purer, more elevated, more poetic, more ideally abstract, or at the same time more pathetically personal, threnody—uniting the thrilling chords of grief, of beauty,

Swedenborg's: that the whole of heaven is in the

Victory, union, faith, identity, time, Yourself, the present and future lands, the indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery, Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.

See, vast trackless spaces; As in a dream, they change, they swiftly fill; Countless masses debouch upon them; They are now covered with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known. See, projected through time, For me an audience interminable. With firm and regular step they wend—they never stop, Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions;

In the Year 80 of the States,[3] My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here, from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-six years old, in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, (Retiring back a while, sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten.) I harbour, for good or bad—I permit to speak, at every hazard— Nature now without check, with original energy.

I will make a song for these States, that no one State may under any circumstances be subjected to another State; And I will make a song that there shall be comity by day and by night between all the States, and between any two of them; And I will make a song for the ears of the President, full of weapons with menacing points, And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces:

As I have walked in Alabama my morning walk, I have seen where the she-bird, the mocking-bird, sat on her nest in the briars, hatching her brood. I have seen the he-bird also; I have paused to hear him, near at hand, inflating his throat, and joyfully singing. And while I paused, it came to me that what he really sang for was not there only, Nor for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes; But subtle, clandestine, away beyond, A charge transmitted, and gift occult, for those being born.

I will effuse egotism, and show it underlying all—and I will be the bard of personality; And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other; And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present—and can be none in the future; And I will show that, whatever happens to anybody, it may be turned to beautiful results—and I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death; And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact, And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.

Was somebody asking to see the Soul? See! your own shape and countenance—persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands. All hold spiritual joys, and afterwards loosen them: How can the real body ever die, and be buried? Of your real body, and any man's or woman's real body, Item for item, it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleaners, and pass to fitting spheres, Carrying what has accrued to it from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Not the types set up by the printer return their impression, the meaning,

dolce affettuoso

Affectionate sweet

These my voice announcing—I will sleep no more, but arise; You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.

See! steamers steaming through my poems! See in my poems immigrants continually coming and landing; See in arriere, the wigwam, the trail, the hunter's hut, the flat-boat, the maize-leaf, the claim, the rude fence, and the backwoods village; See, on the one side the Western Sea, and on the other the Eastern Sea, how they advance and retreat upon my poems, as upon their own shores; See pastures and forests in my poems—See animals, wild and tame—See, beyond the Kanzas, countless herds of buffalo, feeding on short curly grass; See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce; See the many-cylindered steam printing-press—See the electric telegraph, stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan; See, through Atlantica's depths, pulses American, Europe reaching—pulses of Europe, duly returned; See the strong and quick locomotive, as it departs, panting, blowing the steam-whistle; See ploughmen, ploughing farms—See miners, digging mines—See the numberless factories; See mechanics, busy at their benches, with tools—See, from among them, superior judges, philosophs, Presidents, emerge, dressed in working dresses; See, lounging through the shops and fields of the States, me, well-beloved, close-held by day and night; Hear the loud echoes of my songs there! Read the hints come at last.

Very prophetic

Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like a God. Lo! how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest; His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere—he colonises the Pacific, the archipelagoes; With the steam-ship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the wholesale engines of war, With these, and the world-spreading factories, he interlinks all geography, all lands; —What whispers are these, O lands, running ahead of you, passing under the seas?

Is humanity forming en masse?—for lo! tyrants tremble, crowns grow dim; The earth, restive, confronts a new era, perhaps a general divine war; No one knows what will happen next—such portents fill the days and nights.

I will be even with you, and you shall be even with me. If you stand at work in a shop, I stand as nigh as the nighest in the same shop; If you bestow gifts on your brother or dearest friend, I demand as good as your brother or dearest friend; If your lover, husband, wife, is welcome by day or night, I must be personally as welcome; If you become degraded, criminal, ill, then I become so for your sake; If you remember your foolish and outlawed deeds, do you think I cannot remember my own foolish and outlawed deeds? If you carouse at the table, I carouse at the opposite side of the table; If you meet some stranger in the streets, and love him or her—why I often meet strangers in the street, and love them. Why, what have you thought of yourself? Is it you then that thought yourself less? Is it you that thought the President greater than you? Or the rich better off than you? or the educated wiser than you? Because you are greasy or pimpled, or that you was once drunk, or a thief, Or diseased, or rheumatic, or a prostitute, or are so now; Or from frivolity or impotence, or that you are no scholar, and never saw your name in print, Do you give in that you are any less immortal?

Souls of men and women! it is not you I call unseen, unheard, untouchable and untouching; It is not you I go argue pro and con about, and to settle whether you are alive or no; I own publicly who you are, if nobody else owns. Grown, half-grown, and babe, of this country and every country, indoors and outdoors, one just as much as the other, I see, And all else behind or through them. The wife—and she is not one jot less than the husband; The daughter—and she is just as good as the son; The mother—and she is every bit as much as the father.

Sailor-men, merchant-men, coasters, immigrants, All these I see—but nigher and farther the same I see; None shall escape me, and none shall wish to escape me. I bring what you much need, yet always have, Not money, amours, dress, eating, but as good; I send no agent or

your hearing and sight are from you; It is hinted by nearest, commonest, readiest—it is ever provoked by them. You may read in many languages, yet read nothing about