Quotes from Walt Whitman

O past! O happy life! O songs of joy! In the air, in the woods, over fields, Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved! But my mate no more, no more with me! We two together no more. -from Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

And henceforth I will go celebrate any thing I see or am, And sing and laugh and deny nothing.

I do not snivel that snivel the world over, That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth, That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears.

AS I watch'd the ploughman ploughing, Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester harvesting, I saw there too, O life and death, your analogies; (Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)

All truths wait in all things

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry

I depart as air .... I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

TO FOREIGN LANDS. I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World, And to define America, her athletic Democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.

Come, said my Soul Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,) That should I after death invisibly return, Or, long, long hence, in other spheres, There to some group of mates the chants resuming, (Tallying Earth's soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,) Ever with pleas'd smiles I may keep on, Ever and ever yet the verses owning — as, first, I here and now, Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name

O the blest eyes, the happy hearts, That see, that know the guiding thread so fine, Along the mighty labyrinth. -from Song of the Universal

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?