"Walt Whitman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stern pioneer pride of the West. There is a mighty simplicity about him. He is Walt Whitman's works bound in flesh and blood. He is a man of few words, and of instinctive psychic force, and is the big blond beast of Nietzsche. He knows just what he is doing and why, and has a great influence on the crowd: the mob went wild at his mere presence, and ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Lincoln following. But the greater part of the best intelligence of the North could have subscribed to Motley's words, "My respect for the character of the President increases every day."(1) The impression he made on men of original mind is shadowed in the words of Walt Whitman, who saw him often in the streets of Washington: "None of the artists or pictures have caught the subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. One of the great portrait painters of two or three ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... minds of humanity," and we can penetrate into their minds by continual concentration, endeavouring to realise their thoughts and feelings, until we carry always about with us in imagination, as [wrote] Walt Whitman, "those ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... For Walt Whitman too had seen Brother Jonathan Herakles, and indeed the face of the strong and tender wound-dresser was itself as the face of a calmer Herakles to many about to die. The speeches of the demigod in Browning's transcript require an abundant commentary, but ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... me like doughboy music," Mary observed at last. "Nor his going to Walt Whitman to get ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... above passage, now slightly modified, originally formed an unpublished part of an essay on Walt Whitman in The New ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Virginia which Jefferson had just founded, was doubtless revising "Tamerlane and Other Poems" which he was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes was a Harvard undergraduate. Garrison had just printed Whittier's first published poem in the Newburyport "Free Press." Walt Whitman was a barefooted boy on Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years of age, was watching the birds in the treetops of Elmwood. But it was Washington Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth century England would be interested in ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... characteristic of my brother, that, twelve years after his death, Walt Whitman, who always gravely spoke the exact truth, told me that there was one year of his life during which he had received no encouragement as a poet, and so much ridicule that he was in utter despondency. At that time he received ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... English sources, and forced to imitate a literature sprung from a riper soil. Of course, this criticism, as it stands, is too sweeping. It neglects Mark Twain and the tradition of the American boy; it neglects Walt Whitman and the literature of free and turbulent democracy; it neglects Longfellow and Poe and that romantic tradition of love and beauty common to all Western races. But, at least, it makes one understand why the American writer has passionately ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... takes him, but the medium he employs is the simplest and plainest American English. He thinks like an American, feels like an American, is American blood and bones, heart and head. He is not the exponent of culture, but more than any man of his own day, excepting Walt Whitman, he expresses the sterling, fearless, manly side of a great democracy. Taking it in the main, it is admirable, and even lovable, as he displays it. It has no reverence for things which in themselves are not reverend, and since its point of view is not one from ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... where beauty of rhythm, melody of sound and nobility of thought were once regarded as the true tests, we now have in freak forms of poetry the exaltation of the grotesque and brutal. Hundreds of poets are feebly echoing the "barbaric yawp" of Walt Whitman, without the redeeming merit of ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... a halfbreed Indian who sent me a lot of verse. Although he had never heard of Walt Whitman, these stanzas suggest that poet. The ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... most superficially. That very penetrating observer and naturalist, Henry D. Thoreau, tells us that he would often make an appointment to visit a certain tree, miles away—but what or whom he saw when he got there, he does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree near which he sometimes sat—"the Apollo of the woods—tall and graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could walk, if it only would"; and ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... score of camps he may sleep out of doors, on the porch, out under the pines, by the side of the Lake or in his tent or cottage with open doors and windows. At sunrise, or later, in his bathing suit, or when away from too close neighbors, clothed, as dear old Walt Whitman puts it, "in the natural and religious idea of nakedness," the cold waters of the Lake invite him to a healthful and invigorating plunge, with a stimulating and vivifying swim. A swift rub down with a crash towel, a rapid donning of rude walking togs and off, instanter, for a mile climb up ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Cozzens and Fitz-James O'Brien, who have adjourned from Pfaff's beer-cellar near Leonard Street, where, under the Broadway sidewalk, they were quaffing lager and getting up quite an appetite on onions, pretzels, and cheese. They have with them Walt Whitman, who, silent and wholly wanting in that barbaric yawp, is distinguished by what William Dean Howells, ever slopping over in his phrase-making, will one day speak of as his 'branching beard and Jovian hair.' The theatres have a place in the Leland cafe, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... over verse who never dream of it when at home. I am tempted to mention the poets, and even the other authors who gain a kindly rubric for their work from the gentle company of lake and wood and stream. I should frankly name Walt Whitman and Thoreau, and pause pretty soon in wonder at the small number of poets who suggest out-door life as their source of inspiration. A good many of them—read as you lie in a birch canoe or seated on a stump in ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... because Mr. Brock possesses this peculiar sensibility—part aesthetic, part ethical, and part intellectual, it seems—that he can be trusted to detect and dislike even the subtlest manifestations of that quality which most distinguishes Tennyson from Morris, Kipling from Walt Whitman, and the Bishop of London from the Vicar of Wakefield. That is why I suppose Mr. Brock to be one of our ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... northern mists and die in the full glory of a reverberating sunset. And I have also remarked that this same Richard the Actor touched his apogee fifteen years ago and more. Already signs are not wanting which show that Wagner and Wagnerism is on the decline. As Swinburne said of Walt Whitman: "A reformer—but not founder." This holds good of Wagner, who closed a period and did not begin a new one. In a word, Wagner was a theater musician, one cursed by a craze for public applause—and shekels—and knowing his public, gave them more operatic music than any Italian who ever wrote ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... that he too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call generous. The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side of the ocean as any man could have. It was not till long afterwards that his English admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymen some noisy reproaches for ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... strong spirit of Diogenes whose sturdy freedom of thought was like that of Walt Whitman, to cooperate in the review of modern life. Such men are greatly needed to review a corrupt civilization; and where is the civilization now, where was there ever a civilization that was not corrupt? The function of Diogenes is not performed either by the pulpit or the press. A few special journals ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... unexpected and aggravating manner. But after the third day out, he found his sea-legs and learned how to "lean." From two till five his time was his own, and a very good deal of this time he devoted to Henley and Morris and Walt Whitman, an ancient brier between his teeth and a canister of excellent tobacco at his elbow. Odd, isn't it, that an Englishman without his pipe is as incomplete as a Manx cat, which, as doubtless you know, has no tail. After all, does a Manx cat know that it is incomplete? ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... true and mutual deeds We shall at last be shriven Of these hypocrisies and jealous creeds And petty separate fates— That I in every man and he in me, Together making God, are gradually creating whole The single soul. Somebody called Walt Whitman— Dead! He is alive instead, Alive as I am. When I lift my head, His head is lifted. When his brave mouth speaks, My lips contain his word. And when his rocker creaks Ghostly in Camden, there I sit in it and watch my hand grow old ...
— The New World • Witter Bynner
... press is a mild-spoken and truly modest institution which never chants its own praises. Unlike Walt Whitman, it never celebrates itself. Even if it did become me—one of the youngest of its conductors in New York—to undertake at this late hour to inflict upon you its eulogy, there are two circumstances which might well make me pause. It is ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Walt Whitman—he "argued not concerning God." It is a point of view which people like Mr. Shaw can never understand; any more than he or his like can comprehend that there are areas of human feeling over which for him and other such ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... more than Keats was; his traits may be so broadcast that he is in the position of the philosopher who, from the remote citadel of his head, disowns his own toes; nevertheless, a sense of tingling oneness with him is the secret of nature's attraction. Walt Whitman, who conceives of the poet's personality as the most pervasive thing in the universe, arrives at his conviction by the same reflection as that of Keats, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Emerson. A structural completeness in a work of art seems the same in the Oedipus Tyrannus as in "The Scarlet Letter." Art has therefore its law; and eccentricity, though sometimes promising as a mere trait of youth, is only a disfigurement to maturer years. It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote "Leaves of Grass," only that he did not burn it afterwards. A young writer must commonly plough in his first crop, as the farmer does, to enrich the soil. Is it luxuriant, astonishing, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman entitled 'The Flight of the Eagle', quotes the following sentence from a lecture on Burns, delivered by "a lecturer from over seas", whom he does not name: "When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Starting, as Walt Whitman from fish-shaped Paumonauk, from the fierce green fertility of Valencia, city of another great Spanish conqueror, the Cid, he had marched on the world in battle array. The whole history comes out in the series of novels at this moment being translated in such feverish haste for ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... only 'Bradshaw's Guide.' But there is a romance about the matter, after all. Probably the table has more devotees than love; and I am sure that food is much more generally entertaining than scenery. Do you give in, as Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the less immortal for that? The true materialism is to be ashamed of what we are. To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human perfection than to find beauty in the ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... still await their final and just deserts at the hands of critical opinion in their own land. The genius of Edgar Allan Poe gave rise to schools of literature on the continent of Europe; yet in America his name must remain for years debarred from inclusion in a so-called Hall of Fame! Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, the two great interpreters and embodiments of America, represent the supreme contribution of democracy to universal literature. In so far as it is legitimate for anyone to be denominated a "self-made man" in literature, these men ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... little of this precious commodity, more or less, is what often makes the difference between the ordinary and the supreme achievement. It is the liquid explosive that shatters the final, and most stubborn, barrier between man and the Infinite. It is what Walt Whitman called "that last spark, that sharp flash of power, that something or other more which gives life ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... with his head encased in a nightcap lined with leaves of lavender and rose. GRANT, it is said, accomplishes most of his writing while under the influence of either opium or chloroform, which will account for the soothing character of his state papers. WALT WHITMAN writes most of his poetry in the dissecting-room of the Medical College, where he has a desk fitted up in close proximity to the operating table. Mr. DANA is said to write most of his editorials in one of the parlors of the Manhattan Club, arrayed in black broadcloth from the sole of his head ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... slow-moving wagons of our Lady of Eleusis"—and I congratulated myself on my forethought in having included in our itinerant library a copy of Mr. Mackail's beautiful translation of "The Georgics." Walt Whitman, talking to one of his friends about his habit of carrying a book with him on his nature rambles, said that nine times out of ten he would never open the book, but that the tenth time he would need it very badly. ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... create forms of its own. Such a one, in architecture, Louis Sullivan has proved himself; in music Harry Barnhart, who evokes the very spirit of song from any random crowd. The demos found voice first in the poetry of Walt Whitman who has a successor in Vachel Lindsay, the man who walked through Kansas, trading poetry for food and lodging, teaching the farmers' sons and daughters to intone his stirring odes to Pocahontas, General Booth, and ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... day after day, enumerating such groups as her clothes, the objects on the mantel and her toys. Walt Whitman has given us glorified enumerations of the most astounding vitality. If some one would only pile up equally vigorous ones for children! But it is not easy for an adult to gather mere sense or motor associations without a plot thread ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... was clear and sonant; his words were few and polite. Unassuming in his manner, he seemed more eager to receive knowledge than to talk about himself and his work. He asked us questions about America and its literary life: Is Poe read and appreciated? Is Walt Whitman still popular? He admired them both; he had a great craving for the new; and to read things about America fascinated him. When we rose to leave, we realized that we had been doing the talking, but on both of us the personality of the man, reserved and unobstrusive ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... is, that the whole mass of Stevenson's spiritual and intellectual virtues have been partly frustrated by one additional virtue—that of artistic dexterity. If he had chalked up his great message on a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large and straggling letters, it would have startled men like a blasphemy. But he wrote his light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy-book hand that everyone supposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered from his versatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing every ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... for the first time sacrificed every precedent of musical construction and all thought of symmetrical form, in order to make the music tell the tale. "The Flying Dutchman" is to opera what Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is to poetry, or Millet's "Sower" is to painting. There is strength, heroic strength, in each of these masterpieces I have named, but the "Dutchman" needs a listener, "Leaves of Grass" ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... did, in standing still and looking around and loving things, the more practical he is. Even if a man's life were to serve as a mere guide-board to the universe, it would supply to all who know him the main thing the universe seems to be without. But a man who, like Walt Whitman, is more than a guide-board to the universe, who deliberately takes time to live in the whole of it, who becomes a part of the universe to all who live always, who makes the universe human to us—companionable,—such a man may not be able to fix a latch on a kitchen ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... an allusion to Walt Whitman, who is mentioned by name, also derogatorily, in the next essay on Howells. The Howells essay appeared two years before the ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... and some of its consequences to others; and although we have some experience of living, there is not a man on earth who has flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical guess at the meaning of the word LIFE. All literature, from Job and Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of living to the Definition of Life. And our sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a vapour, or a show, or made ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the love of man for man, may not be attractive to some of us... But Walt Whitman the tender nurse, the cheerer of hospitals, the saver of soldier lives, is much more than attractive he ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... popular interest and of an increasing number of scholars and critics who have recognized the value of his work. His growing fame found a notable expression when his picture appeared in the frontispiece of the standard American Anthology, along with those of Poe, Walt Whitman, and the five recognized New ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions were free because both were kept in their place. The optimist could pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march, the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... aloud with joy at sight of the sun. I made Bolzano breakfast with me in the little inn at Iselle, and got upon my way again, at something past noon. The vast turmoil of the growing railway was left behind. It was like putting down a volume of Walt Whitman, ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... search until he found "it" on back shelves or stuck away in corners. Angrily he would blow off the dust and then settle himself with a sigh to read. There was always something wistful to me in the way Joe opened each new book. But what a joy when he found "it"—Darwin, Nietzsche, Henry George, Walt Whitman, Zola, Samuel Butler. What a sudden sort of glee the night ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... WALT WHITMAN. - This is a case of a second difficulty which lies continually before the writer of critical studies: that he has to mediate between the author whom he loves and the public who are certainly indifferent and frequently averse. Many articles had been written ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it wasn't! One day when he was with William Nicholson, the clever artist and one of the Beggarstaff Brothers of poster fame, he began chipping at a woodblock in imitation of Nicholson, and produced in a few hours an admirable wood-cut of Walt Whitman, then and always his particular hero. From that moment he had the "black and white" fever badly. Acting for a time seemed hardly to interest him at all. When his interest in the theater revived, it was not as an actor but as a stage director that he ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... watch in the Night Super Flumina Babylonis The halt before Rome Mentana: First Anniversary Blessed among Women The Litany of Nations Hertha Before a crucifix Tenebrae Hymn of man The pilgrims Armand Barbes Quia Multum Amavit Genesis To Walt Whitman in America Christmas Antiphones A New Year's Message Mater Dolorosa Mater Triumphalis A Marching Song Siena Cor Cordium In San Lorenzo Tiresias The Song of the Standard On the Downs Messidor Ode on the Insurrection in Candia "Non ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of the Persian language, and translated from Persian into French the history of Nadir Shah. From the Arabic he also translated many pieces, and among them the Seven Poems suspended in the temple at Mecca, which, in their subjects and style, seem an Arabic anticipation of Walt Whitman. He wrote in Latin a Book of Commentaries on Asiatic Poetry, in English several works on the Mohammedan and Civil Law, with a translation of the Greek Orations of Isaeus. As a lawyer, a judge, a student of natural history, his ardor of study ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... remorse, Goethe regarded it as a false emotion and as unworthy of a man. Although the perfect balance of his mind and his respect for much that he could not himself accept saved him from the almost brutal insouciance of such a form of expression he would probably have agreed with Walt Whitman, who tells us that animals should serve us as an example because 'they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins; they do not make me sick discussing ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... for Walt Whitman And lilacs for Abraham Lincoln. Spring hangs in the dew of the dooryards These memories—these memories— They hang in the dew for the bard who fetched A sprig of them once for his brother When he lay cold and dead.... And forever now when America leans in the dooryard And over the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Walt Whitman, in the Overland Monthly, "are not a group. They are a string of rare and precious pearls in the sapphire center of the great American seas. Some day we shall gather up the pretty string of pearls and throw it merrily ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... has left the genteel tradition entirely behind is perhaps Walt Whitman. For this reason educated Americans find him rather an unpalatable person, who they sincerely protest ought not to be taken for a representative of their culture; and he certainly should not, because their culture is so genteel and traditional. But the foreigner may sometimes think otherwise, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... man or beast, you must follow him to his home, and if you have pluck enough to brave the swamp and the almost impenetrable tangle of undergrowth where the water thrush chooses to nest, there "In the swamp in secluded recesses, a shy and hidden bird is warbling a song;" and this warbled song that Walt Whitman so adored gives you your first clue to the proper classification of the bird. It has nothing in common with the serene, hymn-like voices of the true thrushes; the bird has no flute-like notes, but an emphatic smacking or chucking kind ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... bishop welcoming the return of an apostate to the Christian fold. I suppose it was partly because of his early solitary life at school, partly because of the general trend of his thought, partly that at this later date he was under the influence of Walt Whitman and cast back upon his earlier years a sort of glow or haze of Whitman idealism. Anyhow, the Junior Debating Club became to him a symbol of the ideal friendship. They were Knights of the Round Table. They were Jongleurs de Dieu. They were the Human Club ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... by priest and publican as a subverter of morals. No poet, no demagogue, had ever so interested the masses. Musicians of academic training held aloof. What had they in common with this charlatan who treated the abominable teachings of Walt Whitman symphonically? He could not be a respectable man, even if he were a sane. And then the unlettered tiller of the soil, drunken mechanic and gutter drab all loved his music. What kind of music was it thus to be ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... realized it, my friends, that Lincoln, though grafted on the West, is essentially, in personnel and character, a Southern contribution?"—WALT WHITMAN. ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... secondly, in the similarity of their binding. I have never before seen the Bible, Walt Whitman, and Dumas in covers ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... had come a restlessness; she felt as though something were giving way beneath her feet like an iceberg melting in mild waters. There was one particular night that this restlessness had been strong. She had been to the Modern Language Club, and listened to a lecture on Walt Whitman, by Dr. Needler. She had never read any of Whitman's poetry before, she did not even like it. But there were phrases and sentences here and there, sometimes of Whitman's, sometimes of Dr. Needler's, that awakened a strange incoherent music in her soul—a new chord was struck. It was almost dark ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... receive such letters of inquiry as that which you have written me. You could not easily have conferred greater pleasure upon me than you have by the charming candor and vigor of your letter. It is said that when President Lincoln saw Walt Whitman, "the good, Gray Poet," for the first time he exclaimed, "Well, he looks like a man!" and in like spirit, when I read your letter I could not help exclaiming, "Well, he ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... dreary. Never was such a fastidious lover of significance and distinction, and never an eye so keen for their discovery. His optimism had nothing in common with that indiscriminate hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whitman has made us familiar. For Emerson, the individual fact and moment were indeed suffused with absolute radiance, but it was upon a condition that saved the situation—they must be worthy specimens,—sincere, authentic, archetypal; ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Pleiades are seven stars making a constellation. Cf. Walt Whitman, 'On the beach ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... be an ill turn for an essay-writer to destroy Walt Whitman,—for he was discovered by the essayists, and but for them his notoriety would have been postponed for fifty years. He is the mare's nest of "American Literature," and scarce a contributor to The Saturday Review but has at one time or another raised ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices! Whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her will I follow," says Walt Whitman. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... The selections from Walt Whitman are published by permission of Mr. Whitman; and those from Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, and Bret Harte, through the courtesy of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., the publishers of ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... by Walt Whitman are inscribed on the arch beneath the group of the Nations of the West: "Facing west from California's shores, inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I a child, very old, over waves towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... naturalistic paths. One of them went upwards through a tangled but living forest to lonely but healthy hills: the other went down to a swamp. Hardy went down to botanise in the swamp, while Meredith climbed towards the sun. Meredith became, at his best, a sort of daintily dressed Walt Whitman: Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot. It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... experience of writing prose sketches and articles for journals and periodicals. During this period he entered into associations with the poets Stedman, Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor, and was more or less in touch with the group that included Walt Whitman, Fitz-James O'Brien, and William Winter. Removing to Boston in January, 1866, he became the editor of Every Saturday, and remained in that post until 1874, when he resigned. In 1875 he made a long tour in Europe, plucking the first fruits of foreign travel, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... very different reasons, as the judge said on the one occasion when he concurred with his colleagues. Dennis accepts the Whole because he finds it a perfect logical system; I, because I find it a perfect work of art. His prophet is Hegel; mine is Walt Whitman." ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... Richard Maurice Bucke of Toronto, Canada, was the first in this country to present a specific classification of what he termed the "new" consciousness, and to describe in some detail, he experience of himself and others, notably Walt Whitman. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... although we have some experience of living, there is not a man on earth who has flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical guess at the meaning of the Word life. All literature, from Job and Omar Khayyam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman,[12] is but an attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of living to the Definition of Life. And our sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a vapour, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contrary to our temperament, for it is the persistent ideal of a great nation and cannot be explained away as hallucination or charlatanism. It is allied to the experiences of European mystics of whom St Teresa is a striking example, though less saintly persons, such as Walt Whitman and J.A. Symonds, might also be cited. Of such mysticism William James said "the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... reading of the FREIHEIT made her a conscious Anarchist. Subsequently she was to learn that the idea of Anarchism found its highest expression through the best intellects of America: theoretically by Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Lysander Spooner; philosophically by Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... one lost good. Whatever of good has existed must always exist. Evil, being self-destructive, finally "is null, is naught." This is the Hegelian doctrine. Walt Whitman said on reading Hegel, "Roaming in thought over the Universe I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality. And the vast all that is called Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead." ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... subscribers. During this time, however, Richard was establishing himself as a star reporter on The Press, and was already known as a clever news-gatherer and interviewer. It was in reply to a letter that Richard wrote to Robert Louis Stevenson enclosing an interview he had had with Walt Whitman, that Stevenson wrote the following letter—which my brother always regarded as ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... more. In a military hospital at Washington, Walt Whitman was engaged as a volunteer nurse. In a letter to a friend, he depicted in a few sentences the tragedy of it all, and yet the triumph of the spirit over the body and over death itself. He wrote of a Northern hospital, but the like might be seen on Southern soil, as to-day among Russians ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Dr. Hubers, picking up a thick, green book, "is Walt Whitman and that means trouble. No one is going to know whether he is ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... of American {546} literature before 1861 with a brief notice of one of the most striking literary phenomena of the time—the Leaves of Grass of Walt Whitman, published at Brooklyn in 1855. The author, born at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had been printer, school-teacher, editor, and builder. He had scribbled a good deal of poetry of the ordinary kind, which attracted little attention, but finding conventional rhymes ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... right to speak for it. "The more the difficulties of multitudinous government are probed," he says (p. 180), "the stronger grows the doubt of the infallibility of popularly elected legislatures." We do not profess to answer for all that may have been said by Mr. Bancroft, or Walt Whitman, or all the orators of all the Fourths of July since American Independence. But we are not acquainted with any English writer or politician of the very slightest consideration or responsibility who has committed himself to the astounding ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... the question of life's worth is answered by a temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whitman's works are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism. The mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitman's veins that it abolishes the possibility of any ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... perhaps be fair to say that it is proposed as a substitute for religious emotion rather than as a substitute for religion since nothing has been said about embodying it in a cult. It comes to us commended by glowing quotations from Mr. Swinburne and Walt Whitman and we cannot help admitting that for common hearts it stands in need of the commendation. The transfer of affection from an all loving Father to an adamantine universe is a process for which we may well seek all the aid that the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the newspapers. Hawthorne's influence over me was still powerful, and in my first attempts at writing fiction I kept to the essay form and sought for a certain distinction in tone. In poetry, however, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and Walt Whitman were more to my way of thinking than either Poe or Emerson. In brief I was sadly "mixed." Perhaps the enforced confinement of my city life gave all poems of the open air, of the prairies, their great and growing power over me for I had resolved to remain in Boston until such time as I could ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... without invitation, and walked in coatless, just as they had heard that Walt Whitman appeared at the Astor House in New York, when he went by appointment to meet Emerson. After hearing Rossetti discuss Whitman they got the virus fixed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... of his glorious Song of the Open Road, Walt Whitman said, "I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes; we convince by our presence"; and it has always seemed to me that this remark is peculiarly applicable to dramatists and dramas. The primary ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... brought out his "Hiawatha" and Walt Whitman published "Leaves of Grass." At this period the "Know Nothing" Party had come to be a power in politics. The party had started from a New York society formed to check the influence of the Pope, for purifying the ballot and maintaining the Bible ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... of poems, happily entitled Airs from Arcady. It contains verses both grave and gay: one of the cleverest is called "Home, Sweet Home, with Variations." He writes the poem first in the style of Swinburne, then of Bret Harte, then of Austin Dobson, then of Oliver Goldsmith and finally of Walt Whitman. The book also showed his skill in the use of French forms of verse, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... discovered, what we in England are only too familiar with, the aesthetic possibilities of charity and the beauty of being good. Dostoevsky began it. First, they ran after him; then, setting themselves, as well as they could, to study Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, in translations, they soon plunged miserably into a morass of sentimentality. A gifted novelist and a charming poet, Charles-Louis Philippe and Vildrac, were amongst the first to fall in. A Wordsworth can moralize, ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... POETRY.—One eastern poet, Walt Whitman, took a step beyond any preceding American poet in endeavoring to paint with realistic touches the democracy of life. He defined the poet as the indicator of the path between reality and the soul. He thus ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... appreciates and understands his painting. What could the critic do with Claude Monet thirty-five years ago? What could the critic do with Robert Browning when he appeared? What has the critic done thus far with Walt Whitman, the greatest spiritual democrat this nation has ever produced? This question is not settled by the schools; it is not settled by critics; it is not to be settled by a group of realists or a group of veritists, or the latest group of impressionists. It is to be settled by the creative impulse ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... yet adored or worship'd half enough, None has begun to think how divine he himself is, and how certain the future is. I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion, Otherwise there is no real and permanent grandeur. —WALT WHITMAN. ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... fellows. Such a feeling of endless sympathy and tolerance is so large a part of love that it is easily mistaken for the whole. For this starting-point, we might readily imagine a Western faith in humanity with Walt Whitman as its prophet. But a second characteristic of Western thought about religion forbids any idealization of humanity as we know it, and draws us beyond the indiscriminate catholicism of 'The Open Road'. This characteristic may be defined as our faith in the worth of activity ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... glorious chant in praise of books that has been sung by the wise of all ages, from Socrates to Gladstone. I have given a few of these tributes already; I will close with one from an unexpected source. Says Walt Whitman, in his "Democratic Vistas," speaking of the books that have come ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... kinds of rebels. By their neckties you may know them. Walt Whitman was of the kind that wears no necktie at all. Then there is the lesser sort, of which Traubel was one—the rebel who wears a flowing black bow tie with long trailers. Elbert Hubbard wore one of these. It is a ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... temporary existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed through and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which as from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman— ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... escaped to Virginia. There he was found hidden in a barn and shot. The body of the Martyr President was borne from Washington to Springfield, by the route he took when coming to his first inauguration in 1861. Read Walt Whitman's poem ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... was serene in the March morning. It proclaimed what an elm could be. It set tree-planters to planting elms. So America preaches, man capable of self-government; preaches over the sea, a republic is safer than any kingdom. Men have outgrown kings. We shall remember Walt Whitman, if only for a line, "O America! we build for you because ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... it. One woman, for him, could make a paradise in which a thousand nightingales sang. And if one particular woman liked some one else better, he just consoled himself with the thought that "there is just as good fish," etc. I will not quote Walt Whitman and say his feet were tenoned and mortised in granite, but they were well planted on the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... "Old Walt Whitman's my favorite poet," said Tom. "Isn't he the fellow that tells you to 'loaf and ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... I avoid the term Poetry, over which the critics have waged, and still are waging, a war that promises to be endless. Is Walt Whitman a poet? Is the Song of Songs (which is not Solomon's)—is the Book of Job—are the Psalms—all of these as rendered in our Authorised Version of Holy Writ—are all of these poetry? Well 'yes,' if you want my opinion; and again 'yes,' I am sure. But truly on ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... in the way of receiving liberalizing influences. But it was, after all, an accident that he received those influences from France. He might conceivably have stayed at home and read Tolstoi or Walt Whitman! So indeed might the whole English literary revolt have taken its rise under different and perhaps happier influences. But it happened as it happened. And accidents are important. The accident of having to turn to France for moral support colored the whole English literary revolt. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... This massacre inspired one of the most remarkable poems of Walt Whitman, "Now I tell you what I knew of Texas in my early youth," in which occurs his description of ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... California her most picturesque figure. In his three-score and twelve years he found wide experience, and while his garb and habits were somewhat theatrical he was a strong character and a poet of power. In some respects he was more like Walt Whitman than any other American poet, and in vigor and grasp was perhaps his equal. Of California authors he is the last of the acknowledged leading three, Harte and Clemens completing the group. For many years he lived with his wife and daughter at "The ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... this Captain Brown should have his Pinturicchio? Well, might it not be so since Victor Hugo, living in exile, had also given Brown an apotheosis? Abigail also had Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, who was preaching the doctrine of brotherhood, democracy, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... us a mass of stuff, which savours strongly of Walt Whitman, and which, probably for that reason, he calls poetry. We have room for but a single bit of description, which we print as an illustration of the depth of literary depravity which may be attained by a ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... But the term "idea" must be taken as embracing psychic existence in its entirety—that is to say, feeling and will, as well as reason. The dry bones of reason must be clothed with flesh and blood. The appeal is to actual experience. Let Walt Whitman give us his. "Doubtless there comes a time when one feels through his whole being, and pronouncedly the emotional part, that identity between himself subjectively and Nature objectively which Schelling and Fichte are so fond of pressing. How it is I know not, ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... English case. Meanwhile, for the present, I deal once more with that American chaos in which I have unbounded and ultimate faith. From now on I should like to take as my motto almost the last paragraph written by Walt Whitman before he died: "The Highest said: Don't let us begin so low—isn't our range too coarse—too gross?—The Soul answer'd: No, not when we consider what it is all for—the end involved in Time and Space." Or, as the old Dutch flour-miller put it more briefly: "I never bother myself what ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... talk to him, without crushing some flower of his fancy or casting doubt upon his dreams. Oh, the gulf between twenty and thirty! I had never quite comprehended it before. And how inexpressibly sad it was to hear him prattling on of the ideal life, of socialism, of Walt Whitman and what not,—all the dear old quackeries,—while I was already settling down comfortably to a conservative middle age. He had no hope that had not long been my despair, no aversion that I had not accepted among the more or less comfortable conditions of ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... WALT WHITMAN. This is a case of a second difficulty which lies continually before the writer of critical studies: that he has to meditate between the author whom he loves and the public who are certainly indifferent and frequently averse. Many articles had been written on this notable man. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
