On Whitman Quotes

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop some where waiting for you.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“I was not only not popular (and am not popular yet—never will be) but I was non grata—I was not welcome in the world.” But the fantasy of Leaves of Grass being finally widely accepted made him laugh a little to Traubel: “I wouldn’t know what to do, how to comport myself, if I lived long enough to become accepted, to get in demand, to ride on the crest of the wave. I would have to go scratching, questioning, hitching about, to see if this was the real critter, the old Walt Whitman—to see if Walt Whitman had not suffered a destructive transformation—become apostate, formal, reconciled to the conventions, subdued from the old independence.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“He was very debilitated as time went on by the series of strokes that had come to him so prematurely, then near the end by bladder problems, constipation, failing eyesight. Near death, he was in a wheelchair, then mostly in the chair and bed in the bedroom of the small house he’d bought in Camden. He complained of becoming more sensitive to the cold. His room, though, was apparently knee-deep in paper, those unanswered letters, notes for poems, scribbled manuscripts—pleasant to think of him afloat on it all. He never had much money, and when contributions came to him from wealthy friends and admirers, of which he had quite a few, he saved it up for his grand cemetery monument.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“The contrast between “prosaic” (though it isn’t really) moments like this and the flamboyance of often adjacent passages make both tonal realms more effective, more affecting. And, most crucially, they maintain an enduring freshness, a sense of improvisation—more than with any other poet’s, Whitman’s words sound as though they’re being generated as they arrive on the page, spontaneously, with no premeditation, no plotting.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“after the war, with the death of Lincoln. To say that Whitman admired Lincoln would be a terrific understatement—he saw the Union itself, America itself, incarnated in him. He would write almost ecstatically about his encounters with Lincoln in Washington, about the two acknowledging one another as they passed in the street. And about Lincoln as a man, as a figure, his praise was without bounds: “The greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality,” he would say of him; “How quickly that quaint tall form would have enter’d into the region where men vitalize gods, and gods divinify men!” And, on a more personal level: “After my dear, dear mother, I guess Lincoln gets almost nearer me than anybody else.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“The term “mystical” isn’t heard all that much anymore, but in American intellectual culture for a period well on into the twentieth century, it was the highest praise that could be bestowed on an artist or thinker. It”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Whitman’s reticence, or outright deceptiveness, later in his life on the subject was inconsistent, to say the least. It’s often been pointed out that male love, not necessarily homosexual love, was accepted during that time in a way not many decades later it wasn’t: men embracing, kissing, calling each “lover,” was apparently commonplace. In fact, when Leaves of Grass was “banned in Boston,” it was because of the passages of heterosexual eroticism, not the portions that could be construed as being homosexual. There’s no question that Whitman later on did clearly want to temper the frankness that informed so much of the passages of homosexual experience that he’d recorded during those first years of the poems, but the words are there.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Courage-teacher” is what Whitman surely was for Ginsberg, and has remained so for the homosexual community.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Lorca’s entire poem is an homage to the variousness of Whitman’s subject matter, to his broad field of vision, but he most fervently admires Whitman for his expressions of homosexual love;”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Those often oddly vague sexual encounters in which the partner is always indeterminate; that brilliantly metaphored sequence of masturbation, in which the figments of guilt and shame, at least in the earlier versions of the poems, are simply driven past by the burgeoning ecstasies of sexual self-acceptance; in all of it the delight is frank, bold, direct. It doesn’t take Whitman long in his poem to assert that the body is going to be a key”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“His hopes for us were limitless; he even postulated, in the poems and in Democratic Vistas, a certain physique for the American, a certain degree of health. He often, too often perhaps, speaks of “health,”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“begin there, and the “we,” and then the “you,” and there, in essence, the equation is done—there is, as he points out again and again, no “they”: “they” is the thought of the crowd, the mob, the mockers.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then…. I contradict myself; I am large…. I contain multitudes.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“You shall possess the good of the earth and sun…. there are millions of suns left, You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…. nor look through the eyes of the dead…. nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes, nor take things from me, you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. The promise, the promise in much of the work, is that the vividness and grandeur of the poetic self who is making this poem will be so gravitationally magnetic that he will make poets of us all; we will not only be accounted for, we will learn to account for ourselves, and for everything else. We will be again first persons adequate to our greatest selves.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“And yet “I celebrate myself” has to be seen as more than a conventional prelude to a lyrical aesthetic event: it is a proclamation of poetic independence and uniqueness. “And what I assume you shall assume” is a confrontation, really a challenge, a dare: what is being implied here is that the ordinary relationship between reader and poet, lyrical speaker, lyrical “I,” will not be in effect. Something else is happening, something which, on the face of it, is presumptuous. An impertinence which is absurdly reinforced by the notification of a communion unlike any other in poetry: you are not merely listening to me, overhearing me—you are to be taken into my poem with me in a way no other poem has done.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“And might Whitman have been trying, in the largest sense (and the smallest), to revivify that lyric “I,” to enlarge it, to make it grand again, make it more audacious, more authentic than ever by giving it the entire universe, physical and spiritual, as its domain? “I am mad for it to be in contact with me.” Mad for it, mad for myself: “The Song of Myself” isn’t even called that in the first edition, it would only be titled later, but it had to be there all along: Song of Myself, song of me, of me as you, song of me as everyone, and Whitman means it: everyone.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“literary classes, to make it worth your while to give them a sight of me with all my neologism. The price is $40. Cash down on acceptance … Should my name be printed in the programme of contributors at any time it must not be lower down than third in the list. If the piece is declined, please keep the MS. for me to be called for. Will send, or call, last of next week. Walt Whitman Harper’s rejected the poem.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“It’s even been suggested that Emerson also influenced Whitman’s poetic cadences with his own prose—an interesting thought, though I can’t see any real link.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“the creation is a constant work in progress, perhaps finally realized through the poems themselves, but grounded in the difficult demands that all conscious humans must ask of themselves. Whitman asks a great deal and fulfills, at least in the person of the poem, nearly all.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Whitman denigrates technique for its own sake; he slights even extraordinary poetic genius. “The pleasure of poems is not in them that take the handsomest measure and similes and sound,” he proclaims, and goes on: “Without effort and without exposing the least how it is done the greatest poets”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“The poet knows that he speaks adequately…only when he speaks somewhat wildly.” Which certainly Whitman did: there had been no poem in literature before him that had anything approaching the wildness of Whitman’s language and structure.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or animal, it has an architecture of its own.” A “metre-making argument” seems a useful way to characterize one of the routes Whitman found toward his music, and the poems themselves embody precisely that.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“writers.—Lumber the writing with nothing—and let it go as lightly as a bird flies in the air—or a fish swims in the sea. Be careful not to temper down too much.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“He writes things like this: “‘Every accession of originality of thought,’ says the author of Statesmen of the Commonwealth of England [John Forster], ‘brings with it necessarily an accession of a certain originality of style.’” He copies this out, and surely takes it to heart, but, fine, what artist hasn’t had, or borrowed, the same realization?”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Waiting response from oracles…. honoring the gods…. saluting the sun, Making a fetish of the first rock or stump…. powowing with sticks in the circle of obis, Helping the lama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols …
Walking the teokallis, spotted with gore from the stone and knife—beating the serpent-skin drum; Accepting the gospels, accepting him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that he is divine …”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Politically, he could sometimes be called radical, at other times conservative. He was anti-abolitionist, then not. Pro-war with the Mexican War, then anti- when the Civil War was looming. He was generous in his poems toward blacks but sometimes expressed in conversation the reflexive, denigrating racism of his time. He was almost everything, then not, or then at last.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Every sort of family intrigue. One brother mentally “defective,” whose plight surely informed the quietly rending lines: The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case, He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bedroom … Another brother a fatal drinker, leaving a widowed sister-in-law who ended up a prostitute in the streets. Loved his mother passionately through her life.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“Many friends, many people he expressed love to, and for, mostly males. Was he homosexual? Surely, though later in his life some of his more narrow-minded admirers denied it, and he in an oft-quoted letter once did too, but there’s no question that in the poems his most emphatic erotic passion is for men, even if sometimes it was sublimated to a kind of exalted comradeship between males. And there’s certainly evidence that at least early in his life he had had homosexual experiences. Did he have affairs with women? He said so, and there’s one letter from a woman that seems to imply it, but it’s finally very unlikely.”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“But in fact, what’s striking is that there are no “depths” in Whitman, no secrets, no allegories, no symbols in the sense of one thing standing for another, an aspect of matter standing for an element of spirit. Everything in Whitman’s poems is brought to the surface, everything is articulated, made as clear and vivid and in a way as uninterpretable as it can be. If something does stand for something”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman

“It’s essential to keep in mind that in poetry the music comes first, before everything else, everything else: until the poem has found its music, it’s merely verbal matter, information. Thought, meaning, vision, the very words, come after the music has been established, and in the most mysterious way they’re already contained in it. Without the music, there’s nothing; thought, merely, ideation; in Coleridge’s terms, not imagination, just fancy; intention, hope, longing, but not poetry:”
― C.K. Williams, On Whitman