Whitman Nature Quotes

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean But I shall be good health to you nonetheless And filter and fibre your blood.

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

And I or you pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth.

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, one of the nation, of many nations, the smallest the same and the the largest

You sea! I resign myself to you also- I guess what you mean, I behold from the beach your crooked fingers, I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me. We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land, Cushion me soft, rock me billowy drowse, Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product...if we should judge the United States of America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much? Have you practis'd so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Gliding o’er all, through all,Through Nature, Time, and Space, As a ship on the waters advancing, The voyage of the soul—not life alone, Death, many deaths I’ll sing.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runway sun, I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. If you want me again look for me under your boot soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you

Be composed--be at ease with me--I am Walt Whitman, liberal and lusty as Nature, Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you, Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.

Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)

The earth never tires, The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first, Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop'd, I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900. To You WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands; Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, Your true Soul and Body appear before me, They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. O I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight to you long ago; I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect—I only find no imperfection in you; None but would subordinate you—I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you; I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself. Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light; But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light; From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever. O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are—you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?) The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me; The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside. There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you. As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you; I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you. Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they; These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution. The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency; Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

Life breaks into beauty again and we realize that man may bring hell itself into the world, but that Nature ever patiently waits to be his natural paradise.

Human bodies are words, myriads of words; In the best poems reappears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped,         natural, gay;

I sing the Equalities, modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things; I say Nature continues—Glory continues; I praise with electric voice; For I do not see one imperfection in the universe; And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe. O setting sun! though the time has come, I still warble under you, if none else does, unmitigated adoration.

After all, the great lesson is that no special natural sights---not Alps, Niagara, Yosemite or anything else---is more grand or more beautiful than the ordinary sunrise and sunset, earth and sky, the common trees and grass.

It is that something in the soul which says,—Rage on, whirl on, I tread master here and everywhere; master of the spasms of the sky and of the shatter of the sea, master of nature and passion and death, and of all terror and all pain.

The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

The chief trait of any given poet is always the spirit he brings to the observation of Humanity and Nature—the mood out of which he contemplates his subjects.

American teachers said I was illiterate, so they put me in ELL classes. Although I spoke English, I did not speak their English.

As I see my soul reflected in Nature, As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty, See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them. And I know I am solid and sound, To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. And I know I am deathless. I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass, I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains?” “Nature remains.

And now it [grass] seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves, Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps, And here you are the mothers' laps." - Song of Myself: 6

Have the past struggles succeeded? What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature? 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." -from "Songs of the Open Road

Have you ever thought how much is in the negative quality of nature—the negative—the simply loafing, doing nothing, worrying about nothing, living out of doors and getting fresh air, plenty of sleep—letting everything else take care of itself?

Ah the dead to me mar not, they fit well in Nature, They fit very well in the landscape under the trees and grass, And along the edge of the sky in the horizon's far margin.

With the sentiment of the stars and moon such nights I get all the free margins and indefiniteness of music or poetry, fused in geometry's utmost exactness.

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,   Nature without check with original energy.

without immortality all would be sham and sport of the most tragic nature.

I suppose it was the worst book any man has ever written. It was a colossal tome and faulty from start to finish. But it was my first book and I was in love with it. If I had had the money, as Gide had, I would have published it at my own expense. If I had had the courage that Whitman had, I would have peddled it from door to door. Everybody I showed it to said it was terrible. I was urged to give up the idea of writing. I had to learn, as Balzac did, that one must write volumes before signing one's own name. I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must write and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you. Perhaps one does it just because nobody believes; perhaps the real secret lies in making people believe. That the book was inadequate, faulty, bad, terrible, as they said, was only natural.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

Your true soul and body appear before me. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem, I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. O I have been dilatory and dumb, I should have made my way straight to you long ago, I should h ave blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you, none has understood you, but I understand you, none has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself, none but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you, none but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you, I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits instrinsically in yourself. O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life, Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time. I pursue you where none else has pursued you. Conceal you from others or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me. I give nothing to any one except I give the like carefully to you. These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense and interminable as they, these furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.

Paine was a grand fellow — high—with the most splendid sense of justice. But he was a reasoner — not warm — not letting out the natural palpitating passion... which perhaps he didn't have. But I see all that and more in Ingersoll. His imagination flames and plays up, up, up. It is a grand height! And he has so sharp a blade, too; is many-sided, gifted for great effects in different spheres. I don't suppose we ever had a man here so well adapted to that work. {Whitman's thought on Thomas Paine and his good friend, Robert Ingersoll}

The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman. "His favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke "seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds.

You air that serves me with breath to speak! You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape! You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers! You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides! I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.

When the full-grown poet came, Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, with all its shows of day and night,) saying, He is mine; But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alone; — Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand; And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands, Which he will never release until he reconciles the two, And wholly and joyously blends them.

Allons! whoever you are come travel with me! Traveling with me you find what never tires. The earth never tires, The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first, Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d, I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell. Allons! we must not stop here, However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here, However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here, However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while." -from "Song of the Open Road

These groups [of disaffected youth] are not small, and they will grow larger. Certainly they are suffering. Demonstrably they are not getting enough out of our wealth and civilization. They are failing to assimilate much of the culture. As was predictable, most of the authorities and all of the public spokesmen explain it by saying there has been a failure of socialization. They say that the background conditions have interrupted socialization and must be improved. And, not enough effort has been made to guarantee belonging, there must be better bait or punishment. But perhaps there has not been a failure to communicate. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable. In this book I shall therefore take the opposite tack and ask, 'Socialization to what? to what dominant society and available culture?' And if this question is asked, we must at once ask the other question, 'Is the harmonious organization to which the young are inadequately socialized, perhaps against human nature, or not worthy of human nature, and therefore there is difficulty in growing up?' If this is so, the disaffection of the young is profound and it will not be finally remediable by better techniques of socializing. Instead, there will have to be changes in our society and its culture, so as to meet the appetites and capacities of human nature, in order to grow up.

Whitman and the Bible are no more obscene than Nature herself—no more obscene than a manure pile, out of which come roses and cherries. (Quoting C.E.S. Wood)

We who have grandly fill'd our time; With Nature's calm content, with tacit huge delight, We welcome what we wrought for through the past. - SONG OF THE REDWOOD-TREE

Easter will soon be here. Life breaks into beauty again and we realize that man may bring hell itself into the world, but that Nature ever patiently waits to be his natural paradise.

We carry our fresh air with us, wherever we go. He who has it, has it anywhere—nothing can rob him of it. I find in all characters that live close to nature, capriciousness, variability—they seem to pattern after nature’s higher rules. The children are that way, and dogs, cats—not but that their perceptions, intuitions, are keen enough, but with the capricious, too.

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

The red aborigines, Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds, calls as of birds and animals in the woods, syllabled to us for names, Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk, Natchez, Chattahoochee, Kaqueta, Oronoco, Wabash, Miami, Saginaw, Chippewa, Oshkosh, Walla-Walla, Leaving such to the States, they melt, they depart, charging the water and the land with names." -from "Starting from Paumanok

Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world.

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost... ...Ample are time and space—ample the fields of Nature. The body, sluggish, aged, cold—the embers left from earlier fires, The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;

He was a poet with a rough skin: one whose sturdiness was more the result of external circumstances than of intrinsic nature. Too kindly constituted to be very provident, he was yet not imprudent. He had a quiet humorousness of disposition, not out of keeping with a frequent melancholy, the general expression of his countenance being one of abstraction. Like Walt Whitman he felt as his years increased— 'I foresee too much; it means more than I thought.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker)

All this was only, in my father's estimation, a means; the end was the Earthly Paradise, the translation of William Morris's 'News from Nowhere' into 'News from Somewhere.' Then Whitman's sense of abounding joy in his own and all creation's sensuality would sweep away the paltry backwaters of bourgeois morality; the horrors of industrial ugliness which Ruskin so eloquently denounced would dissolve, and die forgotten as a dream (phrases from hymns still washed about in my father's mind) as slums were transformed into garden cities, and the belching smoke of hateful furnaces into the cool elegance of electric power. As for the ferocious ravings of my namesake, Carlyle, about the pettifogging nature of modern industrial man's pursuits and expectations -- all that would be corrected as he was induced to spend ever more of his increasing leisure in cultural and craft activities; in the enjoyment of music, literature and art. It was pefectly true -- a point that Will Straughan was liable to bring up at the Saturday evening gatherings -- that on the present form the new citizenry might be expected to have a marked preference for dog-racing over chamber music or readings from 'Paradise Lost,' but, my father would loftily point out, education would change all that. Education was, in fact, the lynchpin of the whole operation; the means whereby the Old Adam of the Saturday night booze-up, and fondness for Marie Lloyd in preference to Beatrice Webb, would be cast off, and the New Man be born as potential fodder for third Programmes yet to come.

It is almost incredible what a little stretch of nature will do to arouse a fellow—convert him, so to speak. I cannot think of a rarer experience than one I met on the river Saguenay, up there in Canada. The river’s water is an inky black—a curious study, I believe, to this day to the scientific men: take it up in a bucket, and it is still unmistakably black—the color of the stream. Oh! that great day! Down the stream a boat—sails open—wing-a-wing—one one side, one the other—patched, stained, heavy—but oh! how beautiful! It was a curious revelation out of little means. Wing-a-wing is rarely fine anyhow—I have not known it much in pictures—but few artists can accomplish it. See then, the large result of what may seem a small impulse. Why should we go hunt beauty then—I should rather ask—where can you go to get away from it?

the swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no . . . . when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart . . . . and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape . . . . or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth—then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.

  Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,   Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irrational things,   Imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they,   Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less       important than I thought,   Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or the Tennessee,       or far north or inland,   A river man, or a man of the woods or of any farm-life of these       States or of the coast, or the lakes or Kanada,   Me wherever my life is lived, O to be self-balanced for contingencies,   To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as       the trees and animals do.

It is with America as it is with nature: I believe our institutions can digest, absorb, all elements, good and bad, godlike or devilish, that come along: it seems impossible for nature to fail to make good in the processes peculiar to her: in the same way it is impossible for America to fail to turn the worst luck into best--curses into blessings.

Proud music of the sea-storm! Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies! Strong hum of forest tree-tops! wind of the mountains! Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras! You serenades of phantoms, with instruments alert, Blending, with Nature's rhythmus, all the tongues of nations; You chords left as by vast composers! you choruses!

he was mainly a romantic comrade who had a series of intense relationships with young men, most of whom went on to get married and have children. Whatever the nature of his physical relationships with them, most of the passages about same-sex love in his poems were not out of keeping with then-current theories and practices that underscored the healthiness of such love.

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

The morning grass was damp and cool with dew. My yellow rain slicker must have looked sharp contrasted against the bright green that spring provided. I must have looked like an early nineteenth century romantic poet (Walt Whitman, perhaps?) lounging around a meadow celebrating nature and the glory of my existence. But don’t make this about me. Don’t you dare. This was about something bigger than me (by at least 44 feet). I was there to unselfishly throw myself in front of danger (nothing is scarier than a parked bulldozer), in the hopes of saving a tree, and also procuring a spot in a featured article in my local newspaper. It’s not about celebrity for me, it’s about showing that I care. It’s not enough to just quietly go about caring anymore. No, now we need the world to see that we care. I was just trying to do my part to show I was doing my part. But no journalists or TV news stations came to witness my selfless heroics. In fact, nobody came at all, not even Satan’s henchmen (the construction crew). People might scoff and say, “But it was Sunday.” Yes, it was Sunday. But if you’re a hero you can’t take a day off. I’d rather be brave a day early than a day late. Most cowards show up late to their destiny. But I always show up early, and quite often I leave early too, but at least I have the guts to lay down my life for something I’d die for. Now I only laid down my life for a short fifteen-minute nap, but I can forever hold my chin high as I loudly tell anyone who will listen to my exploits as an unsung hero (not that I haven’t written dozens of songs dedicated to my bravery). Most superheroes hide anonymously behind masks. That’s cowardly to me. I don’t wear a mask. And the only reason I’m anonymous is that journalists don’t respond to my requests for interviews, and when I hold press conferences nobody shows up, not even my own mother. The world doesn’t know all the good I’ve done for the world. And that’s fine with me. Not really. But if I have to go on being anonymous to make this world a better place, I will. But that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about changing my hours of altruism from 7-8 am Sunday mornings to 9-5 am Monday through Friday, and only doing deeds of greatness in crowded locations.

O baffled, balk'd, bent to the very earth, Oppress'd with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd, Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows, With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written, Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath. I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can, Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me, Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all.

The new society at last, proportionate to Nature, In man of you, more than your mountain peaks or stalwart trees imperial, In woman more, far more, than all your gold or vines, or even vital air. Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared, I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal, Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand, To build a grander future.

This is the meal pleasantly set . . . . this is the meat and drink for natural hunger, It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous . . . . I make appointments with all, I will not have a single person slighted or left away, I will not have a single person slighted or left away, The keptwoman and sponger and thief are hereby invited . . . . the heavy-lipped slave is invited . . . . the venerealee is invited, There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

We seem afraid of the natural forces. John Burroughs puts it well, says, if the American is only dry, he is not content to take a drink of pure cold water, but must put sugar into it, or a flavor. To me, these things—the things of which these are the type—are the prominent dangers in the future of our America. The exhilaration of such freedom—the going and coming—the being master of yourself and of the road! No one who is not a walker can begin to know it! Oh! the long, long walks, way into the nights!—in the after hours—sometimes lasting till two or three in the morning! The air, the stars, the moon, the water—what a fullness of inspiration they imparted!—what exhilaration! And there were the detours, too—wanderings off into the country out of the beaten path: I remember one place in Maryland in particular to which we would go. How splendid, above all, was the moon—the full moon, the half moon: and then the wonder, the delight, of the silences.

I don’t seem to have any advice to give, except perhaps this: Be natural, be natural, be natural! Be a damned fool, be wise if you must (can’t help it), be anything—only be natural! Almost any writer who is willing to be himself will amount to something—because we all amount to something, to about the same thing, at the roots. The trouble mostly is that writers become writers and cease to be men: writers reflect writers, writers again reflect writers, until the man is worn thin—worn through.

Walt Whitman asked that which we all primally ask: The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? We hold the ten thousand things of the troubled earth in mind and in spirit while offering the few beautiful things that we, and we alone, are able to offer with our ten little fingers. Whitman answered his own question: That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. This is all we have—our life and what we give. In our ragged wandering with padded feet and pricked ears and rewilded minds we find gifts from the wild earth, and we come to share our own gifts in return.

Then not your deeds only O voyagers, O scientists and inventors, shall be justified, All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth’d, All affection shall be fully responded to, the secret shall be told, All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and hook’d and link’d together, The whole earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, shall be completely Justified, Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish’d and compacted by the true son of God, the poet, (He shall indeed pass the straits and conquer the mountains, He shall double the cape of Good Hope to some purpose,) Nature and Man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more, The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them.

owning states, since he was an ardent Abolitionist). Among those directly inspired by Emerson’s lectures and writings were Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson (the two greatest American poets of the Nineteenth Century), Henry David Thoreau (the greatest literary observer of nature), John Muir (wilderness advocate and “Father of the National Parks”), and William James (pioneering psychologist and founder of Pragmatic philosophy). He also met President Abraham Lincoln and encouraged him to declare an end to slavery, which he did the next year with the Emancipation Proclamation. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s reach was vast, and his influence has continued to reverberate through every succeeding generation.

By sacralizing both nature and human flesh, Whitman set the poetic template for what some consider a homegrown Tantra, the stream of Vedic spirituality that sees the divine in the mundane and directs sensory experience toward spiritual realization. “He taught people a way of beholding nature which is itself a form of prayer,” said the author and poet Diane Ackerman. She called Leaves of Grass “a sacred American text about the essential goodness and perfectibility of people, the sanctity of the common man, the holiness of the human body viewed naked and up close, the privilege of democracy, the need to forge one’s own destiny, and the duty of all to discover the world anew, by living in a state of rampant amazement at the endless pocket-size miracles one encounters every day.”16 That is as good a description of an American Tantra as can be imagined. Transcendental

‎"What Zolberg calls the 'Melville principle' is an excellent expression of the fundamental right to free movement... for one surely needs to explain what is natural about state structures, in rich and poor countries alike, that confine the movements of billions of people to live and play anywhere they want. Melville's vision, echoed in Walt Whitman's poetry, is a far better prospect to imagine than the persistence of a primitive form of nationalism based on exclusion and expulsion, or a social model of gated communities antagonizing the poor by keeping them out of bounds. These are simply not rational long-term solutions for an already besieged planet. If Moors or Moriscos are the residual prototype of Gypsies, Native Americans, Africans, Jews, Hispanics, and, in general, the West's undesirables since 1492, we might as well avoid the tragedies that dogmatic concepts of national identities have engendered -- the expulsion of Jews in 1492; the expulsion of Moriscos in 1609; the scapegoating of minorities as infidels in the nation's holy body politic; and the horrors of genocide visited on various non-Europeans and on Jews in Nazi Germany -- by accepting our true nature as mestizos in a world where national, racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries are dangerous illusions.

Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task; it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion a year, but that Gross National Product … counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

From another perspective, free will is not illusory at all. So long as we have relatively undamaged brains and relatively normal upbringings, each of us has a very real capacity to execute and to inhibit voluntary action, thanks to our brain’s ability to control our many degrees of freedom. This kind of freedom is both a freedom from and a freedom to. It is a freedom from immediate causes in the world or in the body, and from coercion by authorities, hypnotists and mesmerists, or social-media pushers. It is not, however, freedom from the laws of nature or from the causal fabric of the universe. It is a freedom to act according to our beliefs, values, and goals, to do as we wish to do, and to make choices according to who we are. The reality of this kind of free will is underlined by the fact that it cannot be taken for granted. Brain injuries, or unlucky draws from the lotteries of our genes and our environments, can undermine our ability to exercise voluntary behaviour. People with anarchic hand syndrome make voluntary actions which they do not experience as being theirs, while those with akinetic mutism are unable to make any voluntary actions at all. An awkwardly located brain tumour can transform an engineering student into a mass school shooter, as happened in the case of Charles Whitman, the ‘Texas Tower Sniper’, or engender in a previously blameless teacher a rampant paedophilia – a tendency which disappeared when the tumour was removed, and returned when it grew back.

I have noticed that many intellectuals turn themselves off the instant they are confronted with the words witchcraft, magic, occultism, and religion, as if such ideas exert a dangerous power that might weaken their rational faculties. Yet many of these people maintain a generous openness about visionaries, poets, and artists, some of whom may be quite mad according to “rational” standards. They are fascinated by people of diverse professions and lifestyles who have historical ties with, let us say, the Transcendentalists or the Surrealists, as long as the word occult is not mentioned. If Neo-Paganism were presented as an intellectual and artistic movement whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of sexuality, and the meaning of community, academics would flock to study it. Political philosophers would write articles on the Neo-Pagans’ sense of wonder and the minority vision they represent. Literary critics would compare the poetic images in the small magazines published and distributed by the groups with images in the writings of Blake and Whitman. Jungian psychologists would rush to study the Neo-Pagans’ use of ancient archetypes and their love of the classics and ancient lore. But words like witch and pagan do not rest easily in the mind or on the tongue. Although reporting on Paganism and Wicca has improved in the last decade, pop journalists often still present a Neo-Paganism composed of strange characters and weird rites.

Liberty is poorly served by men whose good intent is quelled from one failure or two failures or any number of failures, or from the casual indifference or ingratitude of the people, or from the sharp show of the tushes of power, or the bringing to bear soldiers and cannon or any penal statutes. Liberty relies upon itself, invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed, and knows no discouragement. The battle rages with many a loud alarm and frequent advance and retreat…the enemy triumphs…the prison, the handcuffs, the iron necklace and anklet, the scaffold, garrote and leadballs do their work…the cause is asleep…the strong throats are choked with their own blood…the young men drop their eyelashes toward the ground when they pass each other…and is liberty gone out of that place? No never. When liberty goes it is not the first to go nor the second or third to go…it waits for all the rest to go…it is the last…When the memories of the old martyrs are faded utterly away…when the large names of patriots are laughed at in the public halls from the lips of the orators…when the boys are no more christened after the same but christened after tyrants and traitors instead…when the laws of the free are grudgingly permitted and laws for informers and bloodmoney are sweet to the taste of the people…when I and you walk abroad upon the earth stung with compassion at the sight of numberless brothers answering our equal friendship and calling no man master—and when we are elated with noble joy at the sight of slaves…when the soul retires in the cool communion of the night and surveys its experience and has much extasy over the word and deed that put back a helpless innocent person into the gripe of the gripers or into any cruel inferiority…when those in all parts of these states who could easier realize the true American character but do not yet—when the swarms of cringers, suckers, dough-faces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no…when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart…and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape…or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth—then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth.

accept Cooney’s changes would “antagonize the White House.” Whitman opted to delete the five-page section entirely rather than issue a tampered report from her agency. Consequently, the final draft of EPA’s “first-ever national picture of the U.S. environment” had no discussion of the biggest ecological threat facing the planet. Shortly thereafter, on May 21, 2003, Whitman announced her resignation.

But something special happened to American poetry in the 19th century when Walt Whitman broke with more traditional English poetics and fashioned an American poetic style as innovative and imaginative as the new nation itself. He created a persona narrator whose ambition it was to embrace all the ideals and spirit of rebellion and revolutionary zeal of its history, while creating a language free of old world formalists constraints. His new music was influenced by the Hebraic bible in its use of incantation and rhythmic repetition, and his stories were also both biblical and innovative in nature.

The literature of democracy was to ignore all extraordinary gifts of genius or virtue, all distinction drawn even from great passions or romantic adventures. In Whitman's works, in which this new literature is foreshadowed, there is accordingly not a single character nor a single story. His only hero is Myself, the "single separate person," endowed with the primary impulses, with health, and with sensitiveness to the elementary aspects of Nature. The perfect man of the future, the prolific begetter of other perfect men, is to work with his hands, chanting the poems of some future Walt, some ideally democratic bard. Women are to have as nearly as possible the same character as men: the emphasis is to pass from family life and local ties to the friendship of comrades and the general brotherhood of man. Men are to be vigorous, comfortable, sentimental, and irresponsible.

Therefore Whitman failed radically in his dearest ambition: he can never be a poet of the people. For the people, like the early races whose poetry was ideal, are natural believers in perfection. They have no doubts about the absolute desirability of wealth and learning and power, none about the worth of pure goodness and pure love. Their chosen poets, if they have any, will he always those who have known how to paint these ideals in lively even if in gaudy colours. Nothing is farther from the common people than the corrupt desire to be primitive. They instinctively look toward a more exalted life, which they imagine to be full of distinction and pleasure, and the idea of that brighter existence fills them with hope or with envy or with humble admiration. If the people are ever won over to hostility to such ideals, it is only because they are cheated by demagogues who tell them that if all the flowers of civilization were destroyed its fruits would become more abundant. A greater share of happiness, people think, would fall to their lot could they destroy everything beyond their own possible possessions. But they are made thus envious and ignoble only by a deception: what they really desire is an ideal good for themselves which they are told they may secure by depriving others of their preeminence. Their hope is always to enjoy perfect satisfaction themselves; and therefore a poet who loves the picturesque aspects of labour and vagrancy will hardly be the poet of the poor. He may have described their figure and occupation, in neither of which they are much interested; he will not have read their souls. They will prefer to him any sentimental story-teller, any sensational dramatist any moralizing poet; for they are hero-worshippers by temperament, and are too wise or too unfortunate to be much enamoured of themselves or of the conditions of their existence.

Bitsy seems unimpressed, even when I describe the big campaign. "You sound like Whitman," she says, slow and monotone. "Work, work, work." I don't react. Instead, I reply by asking about her husband, Whitman Strayer II, a med-school dropout turned venture capitalist who now helps Oxford's elite decide what to do with all their money. "He's fine." She adds nothing more. "Still traveling a lot? Last I heard he was partnering with investors in Atlanta? Birmingham? Dallas? Looking for start-ups." "Yep. As I said, he's fine." She gives me a glance that warns me to back off, so I turn my attention back to the landscape, eager to drink in every gift Mississippi offers. Behind the picnic table, a batch of invasive kudzu has crept in from a steep ravine. With no natural balance to keep it in check, the Asian species now abuses its power, growing thick, leafy webs across everything in reach. Even the trees with the deepest roots have fallen victim to this vicious vine. As Bitsy's words echo, I wonder what lesson the kudzu wants to teach me. Have I, too, done better in foreign soil, opting to go far from the challenging conditions of home? Have I been able to thrive out there in Arizona, living without any real competition? Or am I nothing more than a wayward transplant, an aimless seed taking more than my fair share?

During his years in America, his reading of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the American utopians helped shape his views on how a better life might be achieved through town planning. In 1898, he published Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, later retitled Garden Cities of Tomorrow. His vision of what he called “town-country” remains valid.

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. —WALT WHITMAN

I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains. Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun, go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God. Think of the beauty that again and again discharges itself within and without you and be happy. “Very nice,” Cy says. “Was that Whitman? Longfellow?” “Anne Frank,” Ashley says.

We were meant to have it all; to continually give birth to new desires and to fulfill them. It is the nature of the universe to expand – and we are part of the universe and all-that-is. Our ability to expand, to achieve, and to evolve is truly limitless.

The concept of lack is entirely man-made; nowhere in nature do we find evidence of it. Abundance is our original state of being.

Our gross national product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but that GNP--if we should judge America by that--counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Hand-sewing is calming to me, and I chose to stitch my dress entirely machine-free. For whimsy and inspiration, I’ve selected some thread in a pretty shade of moss-green and continue to embroider quotes along the hems as fancy strikes. Joy Harjo: Remember the earth whose skin you are. Walt Whitman: I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love… Your very flesh shall be a great poem… Now and then I wear the dress on a forest walk, letting it become accustomed to roots and soil. If

Hand-sewing is calming to me, and I chose to stitch my dress entirely machine-free. For whimsy and inspiration, I’ve selected some thread in a pretty shade of moss-green and continue to embroider quotes along the hems as fancy strikes. Joy Harjo: Remember the earth whose skin you are. Walt Whitman: I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love… Your very flesh shall be a great poem… Now and then I wear the dress on a forest walk, letting it become accustomed to roots and soil. If any of these practices and ponderings sound glib or overly lighthearted, know that they are defense mechanisms. Naps upon decaying trees. Sewing of shrouds. Skulls of birds and coyotes enshrined as memento mori on the shelves of my study—I contemplate them daily in the palms of my hands, their intricate post-purpose: Remember. All of this is an attempt at a reckoning with the end of my own life, the constant presence of an inevitability I am as yet unable to fully brook. Some say peace with death descends upon us as we age, and perhaps this is so. For now, I struggle and I stitch.

Authors and poets who address the human condition, mortality, eternity, and continuity with nature that I recommend are Mary Oliver, Pema Chödrön, Paramahansa Yogananda, Michael Pollan, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Rumi, Lao-tzu, Khalil Gibran, Hafiz, Walt Whitman, W. S. Merwin, Thích Nhất Hạnh, Diane Ackerman, Alan Watts, Lewis Thomas, Ram Das, Rainer Maria Rilke, Deepak Chopra, and Wang Wei.

A realm that is beautiful and spiritual, sustaining and transforming- we take for granted those attitudes toward the wild, but they were all but unknown in the West before the Deists and Romantics. Instead the wild was generally seen as loathsome and hideous, fearsome and threatening, desolate and evil and devilish. Hence, romantic and deist thought represents a transformation in our relationship to the natural world so profound it is difficult now to imagine it. Alexander von Humboldt was an international superstar, and his hugely influential science dispensed with God or the divine and proposed that romantic awe in the face of sublime wilderness derives from our “communion with nature” as a magisterial presence, “a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, one great whole animated by the breath of life.” Humboldt’s revolutionary ideas…were transformative for Thoreau, and for Walt Whitman, who kept Humboldt’s books on his desk as he wrong “Song of Myself.

Nature there will always be, but it will not be what we have now, much less the deeper fields and woodlands many of us remember from our childhood. The worlds of van Gogh and Turner and Winslow Homer, and Wordsworth too, and Frost and Jeffers and Whitman, are gone, and will not return. We can come to our senses yet, and rescue the world, but we will never return it to anything like its original form.

I have noticed that many intellectuals turn themselves off the instant they are confronted with the words witchcraft, magic, occultism, and religion, as if such ideas exert a dangerous power that might weaken their rational faculties. Yet many of these people maintain a generous openness about visionaries, poets, and artists, some of whom may be quite mad according to “rational” standards. They are fascinated by people of diverse professions and lifestyles who have historical ties with, let us say, the Transcendentalists or the Surrealists, as long as the word occult is not mentioned. If Neo-Paganism were presented as an intellectual and artistic movement whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of whose adherents have new perceptions of the nature of reality, the place of sexuality, and the meaning of community, academics would flock to study it. Political philosophers would write articles on the Neo-Pagans’ sense of wonder and the minority vision they represent. Literary critics would compare the poetic images in the small magazines published and distributed by the groups with images in the writings of Blake and Whitman. Jungian psychologists would rush to study the Neo-Pagans’ use of ancient archetypes and their love of the classics and ancient lore. But words like witch and pagan do not rest easily in the mind or on the tongue. Although reporting on Paganism and Wicca has improved in the last decade, pop journalists often still present a Neo-Paganism composed of strange characters and weird rites

But when I became a published poet, I couldn’t suspend my Asian female identity no matter what I wrote. Even in the absence of my body, my spectral authorial identity hampered the magnitude and range in which my voice reached readers. How naïve to think that my invisibility meant I could play God! If Whitman’s I contained multitudes, my I contained 5.6 percent of this country. Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?

To understand why people buy, we...should know people and have a keen sense of human nature. We should know how people think...how people live, and be acquainted with the standards and customs affecting their everyday lives.... We should fully know their needs and their wants and be able to distinguish between the two. An understanding of why people buy is gained by a willingness to acquire proved and tested principles of commercial psychology to selling.

Walt Whitman’s eye, that “the history of the world is the progress in the consciousness of freedom . . . The scheme is this: the oriental world only knew that one is free [that is, the ruler]; the Greek and Roman world knew that some are free [the ruling classes]; but we know that all men, in their true nature, are free,—that man, as man, is free.”2

the ideas of evolution and natural selection became our catchall explanation of natural change—and our all-but-universal and therefore invisible metaphor for social change—the Romantic generation, from Goethe to Whitman, expressed its conception of the role of change in nature, quite detached from any notion of progress, in the idea of metamorphosis.

Whitman’s Democratic Vistas. They were all startled that the poet’s portrait of the nation 150 years ago was one they still recognized, a country of endless energy, enterprise, and breadth—both natural and human—but ensnared in a materialism from which it couldn’t seem to escape. Back then, Whitman worried America’s preoccupation with the business of making money would lead to the failure of its historic political mission