Selected Poems 1855-1892 Quotes

“WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking
the walks of dreams,
I fear those realities are to melt from under your
feet and hands;
Even now, your features, joys, speech, house,
trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume,
crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true soul and body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce,
shops, law, science, work, farms, clothes, the
house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating,
drinking, suffering, begetting, dying,
They receive these in their places, they find these
or the like of these, eternal, for reasons,
They find themselves eternal, they do not find that
the water and soil tend to endure forever —
and they not endure.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you,
that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,


— Walt Whitman, “Poem of You, Whoever You Are,” Selected Poems 1855-1892 (Stonewall Inn Editions September 20, 2000) First published October 1, 1980.”
― Walt Whitman, Selected Poems 1855-1892

“In the beauty of poems are the tuft and final applause of science.”
― Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855–1892 (Stonewall Inn Editions

“Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves.”
― Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855–1892 (Stonewall Inn Editions