Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?
Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has,
I will have purposes as health or heat or snow have and be as regardless of observation.
Do you take it I would astonish?
Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?
Do I astonish more than they?

Nature, true nature, and the true idea of nature, long absent, must, above all, become fully restored, enlarged, and must furnish the pervading atmosphere to poems. Out of this principle came “Leaves of Grass.” It, I, must be, are, more indebted to nature than we know.
I have aimed to draw near, or remain near, the mysteries of nature; to feel their breath, even when I knew nothing of what they meant, and could but wonder and listen, as if to vague music. The sky, the sea—no one knows how precious these have been to me. And indeed, it is to surcharge “Leaves of Grass” with them that was my presiding spinal purpose from the start—to inject nature through civilization.

I have attempted to construct a poem on the open principles of nature,
Not the best laid out garden or parterre has been my model, but nature has been—
Never a garden with regular beds, smooth walks, trimm’d hedges, poseys and nightingales, and a marble fountain,
But the whole orb, with its geologic history,
The stretching landscape and distant sky, the rushing river or briny sea,
The forest wild-wood at twilight, the waving oaks and cedars in the wind,
And the impalpable odor.

Perfume this book of mine O blood-red roses!
Give me of you O spring, before I close, to put between its pages!
O deathless grass, of you!
O for the dropping of raindrops in a song!
O for the sunshine and motion of waves in a song!

Had I the choice to tally greatest bards, O sea, all these I’d gladly barter,
Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me transfer,
Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse,
And leave its odor there.
Crook-tongued waves! O, I will yet sing, some day, what you have said to me.

“Leaves Of Grass” may be described as the song of entire faith in all that nature is, universal and particular. “Leaves of Grass” is a seashore, a mountain, floating cloud, sweeping river, storm, lightning, passion, freedom, and all the tremendous, vital, throbbing, resistless, overwhelming, stupendous forces (I hope) included in, implied by, these.
My book—full of life, infolding all life—ought to emanate buoyancy and gladness legitimately enough, for it was grown out of those natural elements.

Fortunately there is the original inexhaustible fund of buoyancy, normally resident in the race, forever eligible to be appeal’d to and relied on. The pages may carry ray of sun, or smell of grass or corn, or call of bird, or gleam of stars by night, or snowflakes falling fresh and mystic, to denizen of heated city house, or tired workman or workwoman—or maybe in sick-room or prison—to serve as cooling breeze, or nature’s aroma, to some fever’d mouth or latent pulse.

My poems when complete should be a unity, in the same sense that the earth is, or that the human body is. The book must express the effort to fuse man and nature, to reconcile and make harmonious in man that part of him which is moral ideas with that part of him which is physical nature.
The visions of poets will, now and ever, so link and tally the rational physical being of man, with the ensembles of time and space, and with this vast and multiform show, nature, surrounding him, ever tantalizing him, equally a part and yet not a part of him, as to essentially harmonize, satisfy, and put at rest.

The singular problems of the subjectiveness of man in the objectiveness of the universe—so near, and yet so far—Whitman unhesitatingly grapples with and solves them as far as they are capable of solution. Never before have we so thoroughly had man in the open air, confronting, and a part of, nature and the seasons, and so squarely adjusted to the sun by day, the stars by night, and affiliated to their own spirit, as in these poems.

Between this beautiful but dumb earth, with all its manifold eloquent but inarticulate shows and objects,
And on the other part the being man, curious, questioning,
The full-grown poet came.
Out spake pleased nature, saying, He is mine;
But out spake too the soul of man, proud, jealous and unreconciled, Nay he is mine alone.
The full-grown poet stood between the two, and took each by the hand,
And today and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly holding hands,
Which he will never release until he reconciles the two,
And wholly and joyously blends them,
Nature and man shall be disjoin’d and diffused no more.

Hurrah for positive science!
These are the philosophers of nature,
Advanced, in grandeur and reality, analyzing everything,
Like a grand procession to music of distant bugles pouring, triumphantly moving,
Every one admirable and serene.

Exact science and its practical movements are no checks on the greatest poet,
But always his encouragement and support,
The outset and remembrance are there,
There the arms that lifted him first and brace him best.

The anatomist, chemist, astronomer, geologist are not poets,
But they are the lawgivers of poets,
Their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem,
No matter what rises or is uttered they sent the seed of the conception of it,
Always of their fatherstuff must be begotten the sinewy races of bards. 
Science—the final critic of all, the only irrefragable basis for anything—has the casting vote for future poetry.

But after the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs—
The great poet is the true son of God.

There shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable science; imagination and actuality must be united. The true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to common lives, and to science, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only. Without that ultimate vivification—which the poet or other artist alone can give—reality would seem incomplete, and science, democracy, and life itself, finally in vain.

Great is the faith of the flush of knowledge and of the investigation of the depths of qualities and things; circling here swells the soul of the poet. In the beauty of poems are henceforth the tuft and final applause of the concrete realities and theories of the universe furnish’d by science.
The real poems of the present—child of the real and ideal, blending the real and ideal, and each made portion of the other—must vocalize the vastness and splendor and reality with which scientism has invested man and the universe, and must henceforth launch humanity into new orbits, consonant with that vastness, splendor, and reality.

Fear not O Muse! truly new ways and days receive, surround you,
A better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you—
Singing the great achievements of the present, the genius of the modern,
The strong light works of engineers,
The old, old urge, from science and the modern still impell’d,
Based on the ancient pinnacles, lo, newer, higher pinnacles.

I say I bring thee Muse today and here,
I, my friends, can plainly see her,
Responsive to our summons, she comes!
I mark her step divine, her curious eyes a-turning, rolling,
Upon this very scene.
Vigorously clearing a path for herself, striding through the confusion,
By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d,
Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers,
Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay,
She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware!

Modern science (and democracy) seem’d to be throwing out their challenge to poetry to put them in its statements in contradistinction to the songs and myths of the past. As I see it now I have unwittingly taken up that challenge and made an attempt at such statements.

My theory has been to equip, equip, equip, from every quarter, my own power, possibility—through science, if possible; I understand how that is the greatest. I am not a scientist, but I have skimmed the sciences—taken the cream, here and there—realized in the full what science indicates, stands for, will lead out to.
Then, starting with this, I go beyond—find another world. I turn everything over to the emotional, and out of that I myself, the actual personal identity for my own special time, have uttered what I have uttered. 

Everything culminates in humanity, personality. Above all triumphs of learning, behind every science, is the human critter. That is behind the “Leaves of Grass.” It is the utterance of personality after being surcharged with those other elements.

I am the poet of common sense and of the demonstrable—and of immortality. Some great coming poet will absorb whatever science indicates, with spiritualism, and out of them will compose the great poem of death. Death, the future, the invisible faith, shall all be convey’d. Then will man indeed confront nature, and confront time and space, both with science and con amore, and take his right place, prepared for life, master of fortune and misfortune. And then that which was long wanted will be supplied, and the ship, that had it not before in all her voyages, will have an anchor.

NEXT: THE GREAT MAKER OF POEMS

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).