What is humanity in its faith, love, heroism, poetry, even morals, but emotion?
Our feelings are the creatures of association and education.

Take now the enclosing theme of all, no other theme but love.
Underneath all is the expression of love for men and women,
Now I dare sing no other songs, only those of lovers,
No other words but words of love, no other thought but love.

Away with love choked, correct, polite, diluted deferential love,
As in songs, fictions, and so forth—love-verses sugar’d in rhyme,
The unhealthy pleasures, intrigues, amours of idlers,
The received models of the parlors,
What are they to me? what to these young men that travel with me?

I swear I have seen enough of mean and impotent modes of expressing love for men and women,
This tepid wash is enough to make a man vomit,
After this day I take my own modes of expressing love for men and women,
For who but I should understand love with all its sorrow and joy—
Prophetic joy of better, loftier love’s ideals.

I know that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love;
Doubtless I could not have perceived the universe if I had not freely given myself to comrades, to love.

The heart of man and woman all for the fresh lusciousness of love, sweet love,
Knitting, enclosing, all-diffusing love, 
Love, that is all the earth to lovers—love, that is day and night,
Love, that is sun and moon and stars—love that mocks time and space,
Love like the light silently wrapping all, the flames that heat the world, blessing all,
Love, that is pulse of all, the sustenance and the pang,
Love, the solvent and the setting, ever the sobbing liquid of life,
Love, that is crimson, sumptuous, sick with perfume—
Not the perfume of flowers, but sweeter, and wafted beyond death.

Those who love each other shall become invincible,
And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it becomes omnific,
And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.
Such boundless and affluent souls are met through all the strata of life,
Their centrifugal power of love, I think, makes the awfulest forces of nature stand back.

Immeasurable love, the cause of causes, is the great law whence spring the lesser laws we call nature’s.
Out of the vast first nothing,
The ebbless and floodless vapor from the nostrils of death,
It asked of God, with undeniable will,
Something to satisfy its immortal longings—
By it then chaos was staid with,
And duly came from them a brood of beautiful children,
Whom we call the laws of nature.

We know that love is the law over all laws, because in nothing else but love is the soul conscious of pure happiness.

A word I give to remain in your memories and minds,
As base and finalè too for all metaphysics.
Underneath Socrates clearly I see, and underneath Christ the divine I see,
The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
Of city for city and land for land.

A man’s family is the people who love him—the people who comprehend him,
Our family is where we are loved—understood.
The sisters sleep lovingly side by side in their bed,
The men sleep lovingly side by side in theirs,
The father holds his grown or ungrown son in his arms with measureless love,
And the son holds the father in his arms with measureless love.

What do you call free love? There’s no other kind of love, is there?
Any love that involves slavery is a false love,
Love does not need censors, monitors, guardians,
Love will always take care of itself.

Love is always a great treasure, always,
Fellows who have been very dear to me may be wrong in what they say of my book,
But they are not wrong in their love.
Love is never wrong,
Love, affection, never selects—just loves, is just affectionate.

I am affection, my charity has no death,
A lover of things, yet a lover of men and women above the whole of the other objects of the universe,
Wending my way through the homes of men, rich or poor, with the kiss of a fierce affection for persons.
I tell you I love all—
Give me exhaustless, make me a fountain,
That I exhale love from me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew.

O my breast aches with tender love for all,
I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,
All the righteous and the wicked, all the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
I, the poet who was not proud of his songs, but of the measureless ocean of love within him—
O latent ocean, fathomless deeps, ocean of love!—
And freely pour’d it forth.

Do you hold the like love? for those hardening to maturity? for the last-born? little and big? and for the errant?
Love-buds put before you and within you whoever you are,
They are comprised in you just as much as in themselves—perhaps more than in themselves.
Those beginning notes of yearning and love,
They have come slowly up out of the earth and me, and are to come slowly up out of you,
Buds to be unfolded on the old terms—
If you bring the warmth of the sun to them they will open and bring form, color, perfume, to you,
If you become the aliment and the wet they will become flowers, fruits, tall branches, and trees,
Every breath through your mouth shall be of a new perfumed and elastic air,
Which is love.

NEXT: FRIENDSHIP AND LOVING TOUCH

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).