Walt Whitman

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

Re-examine all you have been told . . . Dismiss what insults your Soul.

Where are your combing seas, your blue water, your rollers, your breakers, your whales, or your waterspouts, and your endless motion, in this bit of a forest, child?

Nothing external to me can have any power over me.

O to be self-balanced for contingencies, To confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs as the trees and the animals do.

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

A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing lacking.

A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.

All the past we leave behind; We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O Pioneers!

In the faces of men and women I see God.