The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman.
Many lines, and even whole stanzas, in this anthology are direct quotations. But often they combine words from different sources in Whitman’s work. I have split up his poetry and prose into separate lines, or parts of lines, and combined those with words that treat the same theme from other Whitman sources, to create new poems and prose paragraphs. Some of my individual lines combine sets of words from different sources.
Occasionally I have changed a few words, or the order of the words, to create verses that read more smoothly, without changing the sense of the line. In a very few instances I have changed or added words in ways that do change the sense, to better reflect my own thoughts, values, and experience. (Read more about this in “The Editor’s Creative Role.”) More often I resisted the temptation to add or change words that would change the sense. I have tried to let the poet speak for himself.
Passages from this anthology may be quoted, without any permission or restriction, as long as the citation makes it clear that they are from In the Words of Walt Whitman, not from Whitman’s own writings.
FINDING THE SOURCE OF A PASSAGE:
I chose not to cite the sources of the words in the anthology, because I did not want an endless series of footnotes to interfere with the reading experience. To find the source of any specific line or set of words, try using
https://whitman-quote-finder.emergent.host
Enter your search string (the quote you want to find), without quotation marks, where it says “write the quotation you want to search here” and click on the “Find” button, which will change to “Searching.” When the “Searching” button switches back to “Find,” scroll down to see the results.
To see the original source in its context, click on the “Open at” link; ignore the page number given there. If the source is in Internet Archive, you can use that Archive’s search engine to get to your source words more quickly. Be sure to put the search string inside quotations marks in the Archive’s search engine. You can “borrow” from Internet Archive for free if you want to hold on to the source for any length of time.
If you get no useful results, try shortening the search string (use fewer words). If the string contains a past tense verb ending ed, try changing it to end in “’d” (apostrophe d).
If you still don’t get satisfactory results, click on “Whitman Archive” in the upper right corner of the Quote-Finder. That will take you to the Walt Whitman Archive, which has an excellent search engine (and is full of invaluable material by and about Whitman). In this search engine, you should type the words inside quotation marks. Again, if you don’t get results, shorten the search string.
Finally, if you still get no good results, type the string in quotation marks, along with the words Walt Whitman, into your favorite internet search engine.
In the Words of Walt Whitman 