"Walt Whitman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... poring over your last two or three letters, and they read like a set of briefs for a debate. Doubtless mine have the same forensic quality. Our letters have become rebuttals, pure and simple. This discovery gave my pen pause for a week. It occurred to me that Walt Whitman must have meant didactic letters too, when he said of the fretters of our little world, "They make me sick talking of their duty to God." Yet friend should speak to friend, should utter the word than which nothing ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... The false theory of ruling in vogue in Media: the plus of ease instead of the plus of foresight and danger-loving endurance. Cf. Walt Whitman. ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Virginia which Jefferson had just founded, was doubtless revising "Tamerlane and Other Poems" which he was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes was a Harvard undergraduate. Garrison had just printed Whittier's first published poem in the Newburyport "Free Press." Walt Whitman was a barefooted boy on Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years of age, was watching the birds in the treetops of Elmwood. But it was Washington Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth century England would ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Miltonic and Drydenic styles, i.e., pre-1660 and post-1660, was simply due to the change in ideas caused by the reaction against Puritanism." Agreeing with Hudson that there is much poetry which is prosaic and much prose which is poetical, he cites as examples: "Prose in Poetry: Pope, Dryden, Walt Whitman. Poetry in Prose: Carlyle, Macaulay, Goethe." He did not concur with Hudson's remark that the "full significance of poetry can be appreciated only when it addresses us through the ear," and that "the silent perusal of the printed page will ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... mists and die in the full glory of a reverberating sunset. And I have also remarked that this same Richard the Actor touched his apogee fifteen years ago and more. Already signs are not wanting which show that Wagner and Wagnerism is on the decline. As Swinburne said of Walt Whitman: "A reformer—but not founder." This holds good of Wagner, who closed a period and did not begin a new one. In a word, Wagner was a theater musician, one cursed by a craze for public applause—and shekels—and ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... subjects, in the heavens above, on the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth! With what fresh delight, in keeping with the scene, we compared our favorite authors and capped each other's quotations! Rare Walt Whitman told Mr. Conway that his forte was "loafing and writing poems." Well, we loafed too, and if we did not write poems, we startled the birds, the sheep, the cattle, and stray pedestrians, by reciting them. I returned home with that pleasant feeling of fatigue which ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... you suppose 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
... 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 in ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... through accident? Of course he liked it. One woman, for him, could make a paradise in which a thousand nightingales sang. And if one particular woman liked some one else better, he just consoled himself with the thought that "there is just as good fish," etc. I will not quote Walt Whitman and say his feet were tenoned and mortised in granite, but they were well planted on the soil—and sometimes mired ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... who never dream of it when at home. I am tempted to mention the poets, and even the other authors who gain a kindly rubric for their work from the gentle company of lake and wood and stream. I should frankly name Walt Whitman and Thoreau, and pause pretty soon in wonder at the small number of poets who suggest out-door life as their source of inspiration. A good many of them—read as you lie in a birch canoe or seated on a stump in the woods—shrink to well-bred, comfortable parlor bards, who seem to you to have ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... pages — an 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 five recognized ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... 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 ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... as embracing psychic existence in its entirety—that is to say, feeling and will, as well as reason. The dry bones of reason must be clothed with flesh and blood. The appeal is to actual experience. Let Walt Whitman give us his. "Doubtless there comes a time when one feels through his whole being, and pronouncedly the emotional part, that identity between himself subjectively and Nature objectively which Schelling and Fichte are so fond of pressing. How it is I know not, but I often realise a ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... is, that the whole mass of Stevenson's spiritual and intellectual virtues have been partly frustrated by one additional virtue—that of artistic dexterity. If he had chalked up his great message on a wall, like Walt Whitman, in large and straggling letters, it would have startled men like a blasphemy. But he wrote his light-headed paradoxes in so flowing a copy-book hand that everyone supposed they must be copy-book sentiments. He suffered from his versatility, not, as is loosely said, by not doing ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... for contemporaries to hold contradictory views of him and for 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 description and which no picture had caught. After ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... Canton To the Cuckoo John Logan The Cuckoo Frederick Locker-Lampson To the Cuckoo William Wordsworth The Eagle Alfred Tennyson The Hawkbit Charles G. D. Roberts The Heron Edward Hovell-Thurlow The Jackdaw William Cowper The Green Linnet William Wordsworth To the Man-of-War-Bird Walt Whitman The Maryland Yellow-Throat Henry Van Dyke Lament of a Mocking-bird Frances Anne Kemble "O Nightingale! Thou Surely Art" William Wordsworth Philomel Richard Barnfield Philomela Matthew Arnold On a Nightingale ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... You promised to do so, but we sought you in vain. I wanted to see you, mainly for your own sake, and also to ask you about an American book which has fallen into my hands. It is called "Leaves of Grass," and the author calls himself Walt Whitman. Do you know anything about him? I will not call it poetry, because I am unwilling to apply that word to a work totally destitute of art; but, whatever we call it, it is a most notable and true book. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life.' There, surely, is the poem of London, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover's catalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, he could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death), 'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter not one known one were remaining.' He traces the changes in streets, their distress or disappearance, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... poetry, the National Airs, Greater Eulogies, dating back several thousand years. I told her of the splendors of our great versifier, Le-Tai-Pih; and I might have said that many American poets, like Walt Whitman, had doubtless read the translations to their advantage. I had the pleasure at least of commanding this lady's attention, and I believe she was the first American who deigned to take a Chinaman seriously. The facts of our literature are available, but only scholars make a study of it, and ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... shall never be one lost good. Whatever of good has existed must always exist. Evil, being self-destructive, finally "is null, is naught." This is the Hegelian doctrine. Walt Whitman said on reading Hegel, "Roaming in thought over the Universe I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality. And the vast all that is called Evil I saw hastening to merge itself ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... Riseholme, for though, as had been hinted, he had in practical life a 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 ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... my God, what a place it was! Buck, have you ever stood and let a six foot of man lash and lash at your head with six feet of pole with six pounds of steel at the end? Because, when you have had that experience, as Walt Whitman says, 'you re-examine philosophies ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... recently been 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 ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... of his glorious Song of the Open Road, Walt Whitman said, "I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes; we convince by our presence"; and it has always seemed to me that this remark is peculiarly applicable to dramatists and dramas. The primary purpose of a play is to give a gathered multitude a larger ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... 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 ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... intelligence of the North could have subscribed to Motley's words, "My respect for the character of the President increases every day."(1) The impression he made on men of original mind is shadowed in the words of Walt Whitman, who saw him often in the streets of Washington: "None of the artists or pictures have caught the subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... what we in England are only too familiar with, the aesthetic possibilities of charity and the beauty of being good. Dostoevsky began it. First, they ran after him; then, setting themselves, as well as they could, to study Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, in translations, they soon plunged miserably into a morass of sentimentality. A gifted novelist and a charming poet, Charles-Louis Philippe and Vildrac, were amongst the first to fall in. A Wordsworth can moralize, ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... assimilation failed and the upper crust yawned off the base like a crab-shell divided. As for the supposed sewed ones, they went to the sub-officers, but the thread was so poor that parting was as thorough as sudden. Mr. Lincoln wonted, as Walt Whitman says, to repeat this tale when the army contractors were swarming in ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... where beauty of rhythm, melody of sound and nobility of thought were once regarded as the true tests, we now have in freak forms of poetry the exaltation of the grotesque and brutal. Hundreds of poets are feebly echoing the "barbaric yawp" of Walt Whitman, without the redeeming merit of his ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... 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 ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry |
