Walt Whitman

Front Cover
D. McKay, 1883 - 236 pages

From inside the book

Contents

I
17
II
52
III
65
IV
139
V
141
VI
160
VII
181

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 216 - Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue ! Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river ! Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake ! Far-swooping elbow'd earth — rich apple-blossom'd earth ! Smile, for your lover comes.
Page 184 - Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity, When I give I give myself.
Page 216 - I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. Press close bare-bosom'd night— press close magnetic nourishing night! Night of south winds— night of the large few stars! Still nodding night— mad naked summer night.
Page 221 - I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air. Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death.
Page 234 - I believe in the flesh and the appetites, Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from, The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer, This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
Page 167 - Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
Page 36 - Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
Page 234 - Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest.
Page 103 - RECONCILIATION WORD over all, beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world; For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin — I draw near, Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
Page 207 - 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 perception 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.

Bibliographic information