Walt Whitman's America Quotes

“He would once say that he wanted Leaves of Grass to be published as a pocket book, to be carried around everywhere: “That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“without immortality all would be sham and sport of the most tragic nature.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice. 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. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise [originally “elderhand”] of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Along with sharp criticism, America needed a class of writers that would embrace the country and give it “a national character, an identity” creating “a new moral American continent” without which the physical one was “a carcass, a bloat.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“The cross-fertilization of different images, he hoped, might help to disperse the various ills he and the nation faced.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“American cultural historians long thought that as male and female spheres became separated with the rise of industrialism, men practiced aggressive values in the commercial marketplace while women, confined to the home, took on qualities such as passivity, piety, purity, and submissiveness. To be sure, as Ann Douglas and Barbara Welter show, the ideal of the angelic, submissive housewife was purveyed in many novels and advice manuals. But partly in response to the forces driving women to domesticity and debility, more vigorous roles for women were defined. Nina Baym and others have noted the sturdiness often exhibited by the heroines of domestic novels, and Jane P. Tompkins stresses the power and cultural work achieved by popular writers like Susan Warner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Frances B. Cogan shows that to counteract signs of sickliness and passivity among women, antebellum health advisers and popular writers held up the ideal of the tough, active woman—what Cogan calls the Real Woman. In health literature, this movement flowered in works like Dr. Dio Lewis’s New Gymnastics for Men, Women and Children (1863). In popular fiction, it gave rise to spirited heroines with the physical capabilities of men. For”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“he was mainly a romantic comrade who had a series of intense relationships with young men, most of whom went on to get married and have children. Whatever the nature of his physical relationships with them, most of the passages about same-sex love in his poems were not out of keeping with then-current theories and practices that underscored the healthiness of such love.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Passionate intimacy between people of the same sex was common in pre—Civil War America. The lack of clear sexual categories (homo-, hetero-, bi-) made same-sex affection unself-conscious and widespread.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Dear Sir—I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy.… I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perceptions only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.… I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects. R.W. Emerson”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“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.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Exclusive emphasis on either the physical or the spiritual Whitman misses his determined intermingling of the two realms. His earliest notebook poem contained the lines, “I am the poet of the body / And I am the poet of the soul,” establishing at once the interpenetration and cross-fertilization between matter and spirit that is felt in virtually all his major poems. The earthly and the divine, the sensuous and the mystical, are never far from each other in his verse. His images flow rapidly from the minutiae of plant or animal life through parts of the human body to sweeping vistas of different times and places,”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“In the free, easy social atmosphere of pre–Civil War America, overt displays of affection between people of the same sex were common. Women hugged, kissed, slept with, and proclaimed love for other women. Men did the same with other men.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“the inundation of the average American’s consciousness with profit-driven spectacles and images would not come until after the Civil War. Before the war, Americans attended to oratory with a seriousness and eagerness that would be frittered away with the advent of “show business,” a term introduced in 1850 but not widely used until the late sixties.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“In a day before passive spectatorship and the mass media, entertainment was supplied by actual people—not just paid performers but also ordinary people alone or in groups. Whitman’s picture in “I Hear America Singing” of average people singing their “varied carols” was more than just a metaphor. It reflected a pre-mass-media culture in which Americans often entertained themselves and each other. Whitman’s spouting Shakespeare atop omnibuses, declaiming Homer and Ossian at the seashore, and humming arias on the street typified these performances in everyday life.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“As he himself expressed it, his was the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths—the greatest in his belief in God and everyday miracles, the least in his acceptance of any church’s creeds.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Similar changes were occurring in book publishing, as authors, who previously had great input into many aspects of production, were more and more alienated from the production process, which was left to experts.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“best poems do not fall into any single—or even double or triple—historical category. The current book tries to overcome piecemeal approaches to literary history by reconstructing the life and times of America’s most representative poet. With a figure as familiar as Whitman, a certain amount of recapitulation or synthesis of known information is inevitable, and I am indebted to many fine studies of him. But the interaction between his life and writings and their historical background has been reported only fragmentarily. Whitman constantly called attention to the historical origins of his poetry. “In estimating my volumes,” he wrote, “the world’s current times and deeds, and their spirit, must first be profoundly estimated.” The poet fails, he wrote, “if he does not flood himself with the immediate age as with vast oceanic tides […] if he be not himself the age transfigured.” In his own copious reading, he had an undying fascination for all aspects of a writer’s contexts”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“His expressions of psychological depression in his notebooks (such as “Every thing I have done seems to me blank and suspicious”) doubtless lay behind brooding lines like these: The doubts of the daytime and the doubts of the nighttime.… the curious whether and how, Whether that which appears so is so.… Or is it all flashes and specks?”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“He regarded music as a prime agent for unity and uplift in a nation whose tendencies to fragmentation and political corruption he saw clearly. Even more than oratory, music offered a meeting place of aesthetics and egalitarianism. If, in Whitman’s eyes, urban roughs gravitated to anarchic violence and politicians to shysterism, all could be potentially redeemed by their common love for music. For all the downward tendencies he perceived among contemporary Americans, he took confidence in the shared love of music.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Nowhere did he act so much as in his poetry. The “I” of Leaves of Grass has proven puzzling to critics. Some have seen it as autobiographical and have taken his poetry as a confession or sublimation of private anxieties and desires. Others see it as a complete fiction, with little reference to the real Whitman, as indicated by the many differences between the poetic persona and the man. Such confusions can be partly resolved by recognizing that the “real” Whitman, as part of a participatory culture, was to a large degree an actor, and that his poetry was his grandest stage, the locus of his most creative performances. When developing his poetic persona in his notebooks, he compared himself to an actor onstage, with “all things and all other beings as an audience at a play-house perpetually and perpetually calling me out from behind the curtain.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Whitman was coming to think that he, above all, was the one chosen to agitate the country. He wrote in his 1856 notebook: “Agitation is the test of the goodness and solidness of all politics and laws and institutions.—If they cannot stand it, there is no genuine life in them, and shall die.” He once declared, “I think agitation is the most important factor of all—the most deeply important. To stir, to question, to suspect, to examine, to denounce!”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Wendell Phillips declared: “Only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.… Republics exist only on the tenure of being constantly agitated.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Mikhail Bakhtin has suggested that truly indigenous, national forms of writing are produced by authors who absorb what Bakhtin calls skaz, roughly translated as “current idiom” or “national voice.” Whitman would develop a similar theory. Later dedicating himself to producing what he called “the idiomatic book of my land,” he would write in 1856: “Great writers penetrate the idioms of their races, and use them with simplicity and power. The masters are they who embody the rude materials of the people and give them the best forms for the place and time.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Whitman wrote articles on almost every topic, storing up images and impressions that would later be useful to him as a poet.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“As a poet, he is both the firm teacher trying to guide us and the mild one inviting us to develop on our own, a paradox captured in lines like “I teach straying from me, yet who can stray from me?” or “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“Whitman would be appalled in the 1850s when holiday celebrations began to be mass-oriented spectacles manipulated by professionals. One of his most famous poetic lines—“ I celebrate myself”—can be taken, on one level, as an attempt to restore the idea of celebration, which was fast becoming coldly manipulative, to the personal and genuinely celebratory.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“As a result of economic change and family planning, fertility rates dropped precipitously during the nineteenth century. The number of children for white American women sank from more than 7 in 1800 to fewer than 6 by 1825, 5.42 by 1850, 4.24 by 1880, to 3.54 by 1900.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

“There were larger reasons for Walter Whitman’s travails. He was a blunt-spoken worker accustomed to honest self-sufficiency in a time when the market was calling for new traits: slickness and self-promotion, with more than a dash of craft. He might love cattle, children, and living under his own roof, but what he needed in the new environment was an eye for the deal.”
― David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography