"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body..."
—Walt Whitman (from the preface to the 1855 edition of LEAVES OF GRASS)
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17 comments:
I gotta say, that's some good shit.
I gotta say, I'm with you. And beautiful to meditate on- divine.
What inspiring words to awake to. Thanks Walt
Nice to see the Keystone Pipeline approved in the senate with a veto proof total of 62 votes.
Lal--Jim's comment shows how irrelevant he is. His comment has naught to do with the quotation from Whitman. It also ignores the fact that a veto can be sustained by the simple expedients of arm-twisting or horse-trading. Grease a congressman's palm and he'll do whatever you ask.
Bob B.
Leaving the stalker's comment in cause you responded to it Bob, but the second one about how the cold weather recently proves "liberals" wrong on "global warming" it jut too much of an unscientific, uneducated, uninformed, parroted rightwing beyond a lie to allow, there's enough of that "know nothing" nonsense out there elsewhere.
the problem with Walt Whitman's "stuff"
is that he never did find an adequate form for his content...
so
he forced his content into those old forms....
which has become a daunting task to wade through.
(you can delete me if you want... rejection is not an issue nor is acceptance
I disagree anonymus. His Specimen Days is a wonderful collection of prose that seems to me to say exactly what he wants it to and with no reliance on "old forms" in fact in many ways it anticipates prose that came a century later if then, and as for his poetry, much of his fame and place in the poetry hall of fame is due to his inventing entirely new forms, so, what exactly was your point....?....
I really needed these words today. Thanks, Lal
and LOVE, 4-evs. xSH
Vice Versa, only double Susan.
I guess according to anon-a-mouse the use of words and phrases is an old form and somehow flawed. Which I guess in turn makes the millions if not billions of people who have been edified and inspired by Whitman for over a century and a half are just plain invalid idiots. And I guess, according to "Jim" (who doesn't have the balls to show his face, which I guess is not as cowardly as anon-a-mouse who's too chicken sh*t to put a name behind the potshots) the melting of the polar ice caps is not evidence of global warming since we've had a couple of cold days in a year where the average temperature is higher than in recorded history,and arming teachers is a solution to out of control gun violence. All in all, just tiresome, punk-ass idiocy.
Hi Bob,
It was 4 degrees in Denver as I left for the mountains this morning. Even for Denver that is extremely unusual for late March. I assume that you can tell me that the low temperature is actually a sign of global warming.
I'm going to leave this last one from the stalker up because it illustrates so well the diminished intellect of those who live in the rightwing bubble. The jet stream is lower than usual for this time of year because, ta da: of the impact of global warming. Yes, you actually have to be able to think beyond the simplest concepts to grasp that temperatures are rising (i.e. the average temperature on the earth has been steadily rising much faster than ever before since records have been kept) which is causing the polar ice caps to melt, so the sun is warming the water they expose and the water impacts the wind circulation on the planet, which in turn effects the jet stream and is causing it to meander where it normally doesn't this time of year, etc.
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