Walt Whitman

So when Mark Twain says, I was born of poor but dishonest parents, the humor depends on the parody of the genteel Anglo-Saxon convention that it is disreputable to be poor, but to hint at the hollowness of it would not be amusing if it did not remain at bottom one's habitual conviction.

The one American writer who 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, since he is looking for what may have arisen in America to express not the polite and conventional American mind, but the spirit and the inarticulate principles that animate the community on which its own genteel mentality seems to sit rather lightly.

When the foreigner opens the pages of Walt Whitman, he thinks that he has come at last upon something representative and original.

In Walt Whitman, democracy is carried into psychology and morals.

The various sights, moods, and emotions are given each one vote.

The whole atmosphere of every art exhibited a direct joy in the apprehension of the things which lie around us.

The craftsmen who executed the late medieval decorative sculpture, Giotto, Chaucer, Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and at the present day, the New England poet, Robert Frost, are all akin to each other in this respect.

The simple, immediate facts are the topics of interest, and these reappear in the thought of science as the irreducible, stubborn facts.

The mind of Europe was now prepared for its new venture of thought.

You catch the residue of it two or three pages later when this same or similar shape turns up and your brain finally flags it as a pattern instead of a coincidence.

Torquemada quotes Walt Whitman almost word for word.

Then, and exactly where the poem's next line should sit, he takes it out.

It doesn't just skip it.

You put that against the Beach Boys lyrics, against the Ramones lyrics.

In comparison, it's like listening to Walt Whitman.

And the poetry isn't even the reason he gets to lay claim to inventing rock and roll.

That guitar style.

And very shortly before his death, according to the same reporter of his words, he said to one of his friends, What do you suppose I have been doing to-day? Why, just walking around Boston and looking at the streets and the people.

Even Walt Whitman could not have taken a truer delight in his Manhattan.

Yet the call to the new parish, like the earlier call to the one he was leaving, could not be accepted until it was urged upon him so strongly that nothing but acceptance was possible.

One may well imagine that among the persistent Boston vestrymen who would not take no for an answer were some of those who had been present at the Harvard commemoration.

His eyes had been attracted by a casual pedestrian that he had never seen before.

This man was Walt Whitman, the greatest American, with the single exception of Lincoln himself, that has ever yet been born.

The thing to be admired among men is greatness, and wherever greatness undeniably exists, there is no time to quarrel about minor questions of degree or quality.

Whoever can do any tiny thing, however trivial, more perfectly than any other person in the world, is admitted by this token to the fraternity of greatness.

And I broke it by saying, well, I'll show up, and I can find someone else's poem to read.

I was thinking of Walt Whitman.

And then we left it at that.

And then one morning, I woke up very early, five or something in the morning, and it must have been my mother's voice that said, get off the bench.

And when you open, when the chorus starts off, it just, you know, behold the sea itself.

I think the libretto is by Walt Whitman, isn't it? Oh, okay.

Oh, right, okay.

I think.