Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass (1855)

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I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, All all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems. Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward and outward and forever outward.

Walt Whitman
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side...The Bending forward and backward of the rowers...

Walt Whitman
But the people are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred.

Walt Whitman
For all these new and evolutionary facts, meanings, purposes, new poetic messages, new forms and expressions, are inevitable.

Walt Whitman
The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Walt Whitman
There is no flaw or vacuum in the amount of the truth - but all is truth without exception; And henceforth I will go celebrate any thing I see or am, And sing and laugh and deny nothing.

Walt Whitman
A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.

Walt Whitman
Now understand me well. It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.

Walt Whitman
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus! Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.

Walt Whitman
The fruition of beauty is no chance of hit or miss... it is inevitable as life.

Walt Whitman
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

Walt Whitman
A man is a great thing upon the earth and through eternity; but every jot of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman.

Walt Whitman
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men-I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war;
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest-they suffer'd not;
The living remain'd and suffer'd-the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.

Walt Whitman
Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood? Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?

Walt Whitman
And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.... And as to you corpse, I think you are good manure, but that does not offend me, I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing, I reach to the leafy lips — I reach to the polished breasts of melons. And as to you life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.

Walt Whitman
The past, the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past.

Walt Whitman
The clock indicates the moment - but what does eternity indicate?

Walt Whitman
To behold the day-break!
The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows,
The air tastes good to my palate.

Walt Whitman
And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other.

Walt Whitman
I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.

Walt Whitman
The soul is always beautiful, it appears more or it appears less,
it comes or it lags behind,
It comes from its embowered garden
and looks pleasantly on itself and encloses the world.

Walt Whitman