"Walt Whitman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lights and shadows and to seize on A finer thing than any verse he wrote? (Oh beautiful illusions of our youth!) He did not see me gladly. Talked of treason To England's greatness. What was Camden like? Did old Walt Whitman smoke or did he drink? And Longfellow was sweet, but couldn't think. His mood was crusty. Lowell made him laugh! Meantime Watts-Dunton came and broke in half My visit, ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... 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
... part of his time, as Whitman 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
... attended, 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 their duty ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... 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 ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... soundness of Morgan's career. Pierpont Morgan's attitude toward his biography (if, in spite of his reticence, it became one of the necessities—even one of the industrial necessities, of the world that he should have one) was probably a good deal the attitude of Walt Whitman when he told Traubel, "Whatever you do with me, don't prettify me"; and if there were things in Mr. Morgan's career which he imperturbably failed to see, Mr. Morgan himself would be the last man not to try to ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to me in the right voice, him or her I shall follow. As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps anywhere around the globe." —WALT WHITMAN. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... second table from the door is claimed by Sparrow Grass 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, and that dark, thin-faced ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... and depth, above all, frank, fearless honesty, without a trace of pose or affectation—such is Ernst Haeckel. There is something about his simple, frank, earnest, sympathetic, yet robust, masculine personality that reminds one instinctively, as does his facial contour also, of Walt Whitman. ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... expressive enough in themselves. All the pioneers in poetic diction assume this risk of using "un-poetic" words in their desire to employ expressive words. Classic examples are Wordsworth's homely "tubs" and "porringers," and Walt Whitman's catalogues of everyday implements used in various trades. Othello was hissed upon its first appearance on the Paris stage because of that "vulgar" word handkerchief. Thus "fork" and "spoon" have almost purely utilitarian associations and are consequently difficult ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Old Walt Whitman, when he saw the wounded soldier, exclaimed, "I am that man!" And two thousand years before this, Terence said, "I am a man, and nothing that is human is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... one huge quart pot of ale, used among them as woman in the early world, was a grateful inglenook, indeed, wherein to close the day. Of course, friend N. joined them, and took his pull and paid his round, like a Walt Whitman. I like to think of his slight figure amongst them; his delicate, almost girl-like, profile against theirs; his dreamy eyes and pale brow, surmounted by one of those dark clusters of hair in which the fingers of women love ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... Walt Whitman was of the people, the common people, and always gave out their quality and atmosphere. His commonness, his nearness, as of the things you have always known,—the day, the sky, the soil, your own parents,—were in no way veiled, or kept in abeyance, by his culture or poetic gifts. He was ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... defined as "the man who regards his passions as their own excuse for being; who does not domesticate them either by understanding their cause or by conceiving their ideal goal."[28:1] One will readily appreciate the application of this definition to Walt Whitman. What little unity there is in this poet's world, is the composition of ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... firm grasp of the obvious, there were windows in his soul which looked out onto vague and ethereal prospects which so far from being obvious were only dimly intelligible. In form these odes were cast in the loose rhythms of Walt Whitman, but their smooth suavity and their contents bore no resemblance whatever to the productions of that barbaric bard, whose works were quite unknown in Riseholme. Already a couple of volumes of these prose-poems had been published, not of course in the hard business-like establishment ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... 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 ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... 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 ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pantries, and soon as musty and as 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; they must have made connection with what he calls the Moral Sentiment, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Wagner 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
... Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both—as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man. Incompossibility, it will be seen, is only incompatibility let loose. Instead of such low language as "Go heel yourself—I mean to kill you on sight," the words, "Sir, we are incompossible," would convey and equally significant intimation and in stately ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... set" as typical of American society. Illustrious foreign visitors fall not unnaturally into this mistake; even so keen a critic as M. Bourget leans this way, though Mr. Bryce gives another proof of his eminent sanity and good sense by his avoidance of the tempting error. But, as Walt Whitman says, "The pulse-beats of the nation are never to be found in the sure-to-be-put-forward-on-such-occasions citizens." European fashionable society, however unworthy many of its members may be, and however relaxed its rules of admission have become, has its roots in an honourable past; ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... 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 purpose of a play is to give a gathered ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... our retrospect 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 ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... of the occasional passages of real poetic power with which Walt Whitman now and then condescends to break the full tide of rhapsody over the eternities and the last patent drill, he describes himself as seeing two armies in succession go forth to the civil war. First passed ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... window, to prove the value of Professor Frazer and culture. Next morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazer's optional course in modern poetry, a desultory series of lectures which did not attempt Tennyson and Browning. So Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt Whitman, Swinburne and Rossetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of emotion. The allusiveness was agonizing. But he pulled off his shoes, rested his feet on the foot-board of his bed, drummed with a pair ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... of his native land, and to free her from continual warlike alarms, Determined that he would popularize the conception (and a very good one too) of a Nation in Arms! Now this is the way he proceeded to fan the flame of patriot ardour— (This metre looks at first as easy to write as blank verse, or Walt Whitman, but is in reality considerably harder),— He assured his crowded audience that, while everyone must deprecate a horrid, militant, Jingoist attitude, Not to serve one's country—at least on Saturday afternoons—was the very blackest ingratitude: ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... 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 ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... 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, as ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... 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, ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... indication at once of 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 ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... sight of refulgent jewels, of flowers, and of fair landscapes, had the same effect upon his nerves as the sound of the Dorian mood upon the youths whom Pythagoras cured of passion by music. He found in them an anodyne for pain, a restoration from sickness. Like Walt Whitman, who adheres to nature by closer and more vital sympathy than any other poet of the modern world, Alberti felt the charm of excellent old age no less than that of florid youth. 'On old men gifted with a noble presence and hale and vigorous, he gazed again and again, and said that he revered ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... you ever, as you walked along the empty street upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to happen—something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: 'Something pernicious and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life; something unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free.' Did ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think that I have—except 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 mentions that in a dream-trance ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... 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 one of ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... truth—that Religion is Friendship—and build its own life upon it, and make it central and organic in all its teachings, should we not have a great revival of religion?" Indeed, yes; and of the right kind of religion, too! Walt Whitman found the basis of all philosophy, all religion, in "the dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend" (The Base of all Metaphysics). As for Masonic literature, it is one perpetual paean in praise of the practice of friendship, from earliest time to our own ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... 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 copies again, something must be done; ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... 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 Heights," in the foothills ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... 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 his ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... failure—or shall we say our delay?—if it were not for two or three of our literary performances. It is true that no novel has been written, and we dare say no novel will be written, that is, or will be, an epitome of the manifold diversities of American life, unless it be in the form of one of Walt Whitman's catalogues. But we are not without peculiar types; not without characters, not without incidents, stories, heroisms, inequalities; not without the charms of nature in infinite variety; and human nature is the same here that it is in Spain, France, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... concerning the various strange phases of social life that puzzled her,—why, for instance, religious theorists made so little practical use of their theories,—why there were cloudy-eyed eccentrics who admired the faulty drawing of Watts, and the common-place sentence-writing of Walt Whitman,—why members of Parliament talked so much and did so little,—why new poets, however nobly inspired, were never accepted unless they had influential friends on the press,—why painters always married their models or their cooks, and got heartily ashamed of them afterwards,—and ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... most manly air, it will not hurt a woman." This tropic summer-time brings the halcyon days of the vagabonds of Madrid. They are a temperate, reasonable people, after all, when they are let alone. They do not require the savage stimulants of our colder-blooded race. The fresh air is a feast. As Walt Whitman says, they loaf and invite their souls. They provide for the banquet only the most spiritual provender. Their dissipation is confined principally to starlight and zephyrs; the coarser and wealthier spirits indulge in ice, agraz, and meringues dissolved in water. The climax ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... 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 wonder of the neighborhood; so much the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... 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 ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... 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 in the public schools. It was called the American ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... of that crude Western world to which we must in a moment pass. But the connection is real and vital. It is well shown in the appreciation written of him and his fellows by the American writer who most violently contrasts with him, Walt Whitman. ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... least, he was making another historic minute; for one of the boys he was thus to lift over a hard spot was a five-year-old child who afterwards became known to the world as Walt Whitman. Lafayette pressed the boy to his heart as he passed him along and affectionately kissed his cheek. Thus a champion of liberty from the Old World and one from the New were linked in this little act of helpfulness. When ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... sleeping 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 ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... provincial tour. His future as an actor seemed assured, but 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 ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... many books written about childhood, and the end of them is not yet in sight; but I have known none that so successfully attains the simplicity that should belong to the subject. You probably identify the title as a quotation from WALT WHITMAN, about the child that went forth every day, "and the first object that he looked upon, that object he became." The child in the present instance was one Anna, who went forth in the Hungarian village where she was born, and saw ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... each to believe frantically that his views were proved by facts. For anyone who thinks he can hit off in a few neat generalities this complex, extraordinary personality, a single warning may suffice. Walt Whitman, who was perhaps the most original thinker and the most acute observer who ever saw Lincoln face to face has left us his impression; but he adds that there was something in Lincoln's face which defied ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... hours on top of a bus in London. I'd like to have these experiences as an antidote for emptiness. It would prepare me far better for to-morrow work than pondering Johnny's defections, or his grades, whether high or low, or marking silly papers with marks that are still sillier. I like Walt Whitman because he was such a sublime loafer. His loafing gave him time to grow big inside, and so, he had big elemental thoughts that were good for him and good for me when I think them ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... the liberties and the Brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? with gloved gentleman words" Walt Whitman, 'An American Primer'. ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... connection with the traffic, and whole friendly intercourse with the country, there is something very pleasant in that succession of saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by, that peoples our ways and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls "the cheerful voice of the public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of the road." But out of the great network of ways that binds all life together from the hill-farm to the city, there is something individual to most, and, on the whole, nearly as much choice on the score ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
