Rare has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker of poems, the answerer,
Vast and rare is the day, and divine is the place,
Not every century nor every five centuries contains such a day,
Nor does every nation hold such a place.

Only at last after many years,
After chastity, friendship, procreation, prudence, and nakedness,
After treading ground and breasting river and lake,
After a loosen’d throat, absorbing eras, temperaments, races, after knowledge, freedom, crimes,
After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations, and removing obstructions,
After these and more, it is just possible there comes to a man or woman the divine power to speak words.

Powerful words uttered with copiousness and decision,
They debouch as they are wanted to march obediently through the mouth of that man or that woman,
Curious envelop’d messages delivering, that embody the rude materials of the people and give them the best forms for the place and time.

Wait till he speaks—what God’s voice is that sounding from his mouth,
Singing songs in liquid-flowing syllables with a flowing mouth,
The practis’d and perfect organ whose sound outvies music,
Who holds every hearer by spells, by pleasing and natural and simple effects—
Such suavity, ease, suppleness, capacity,
Uniting beauty with strength, command, and natural flowing vocal luxuriance.

Nothing is better than a superb vocalism,
There is the consciousness of abounding presence in a superb voice,
The inner, apparently inexhaustible, fund of latent volcanic passion,
The glory of perfect art.

The charm of the beautiful pronunciation of all words, of all tongues, the charm of unswervingly perfect vocalization, is in perfect flexible vocal organs and in a developed harmonious soul. All words, spoken from these, have deeper, sweeter sounds, new meanings, impossible on any less terms.

Such meanings, such sounds, continually wait in every word that exists, perhaps slumbering through years,
Until that comes which has the quality patiently waiting in the words;
I see brains and lips closed, tympans and temples unstruck,
Until that comes which has the quality to strike and to unclose,
The quality to bring forth what lies slumbering forever ready in all words.

The best philosophy and poetry, or something like the best, after all these centuries, perhaps waits to be rous’d out yet, or suggested, by the perfect human voice. It must have its intellectual completeness, its proofs, its reasoning to convince; lively, close, concise style, which expresses a great many ideas in few words; thought and demonstration clothed with sentiment—adorned as the goodly tree is, by the efflorescence of its own branches. It must also have that irresistible attraction and robust living treat, deeper than art, deeper even than proof—something in the quality and power of the right voice that touches the soul, the abysms—its reference to the spiritual, to immortality, to the mystic in man, which knows without proof, and is beyond materialism.

There is a mysterious, wonderful quality in the human voice which no plummet has yet sounded, to which literature has not done any sort of justice—as it could not, I suppose. There must be something in the very vibration of the sounds of the mouth, something in the movements of the lips and mouth, something in the spirituality and personality that produces full effects. 
The voice is a curious organ, and follows the general health, for good or evil. The body must be vigorous and sound, before the voice can be so. All sorts of physical, moral, and mental deformities are also inevitably returned in the voice.

I see that power is folded in a great crackling vocalism,
Measure, concentration, determination, 
Unflagging vitality and determination in every assertion, suggestion, inquiry, rebuke;
It becomes determined, copious, resistless.

O the orator’s joys!
O to have the gag remov’d from one’s mouth!
To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest,
To inflate the chest, to roll the thunder of the voice out from the ribs and throat,
Such power to say, yet not to appear to know all the gravity and wonder of his power,
This gravity, linked with such joy—holding the words at tongue’s end—is a divine gift, a divine fire.

From the opening of the oration and on through, the great thing is to be inspired as one divinely possessed, blind to all subordinate affairs and given up entirely to the surgings and utterances of the mighty tempestuous demon. When you hear it, the merciless light shall pour, and the storm rage around.

Preaching without appearing to be sermonizing is the art of arts,
It reaches the souls of men by pleasing channels, mysterious, penetrating,
As the light, the air, beauty, the songs of birds reach the soul,
Those piercing and all-lively strokes that reach the inmost soul, without the soul being conscious of it.

The place of the orator and his hearers is truly an agonistic arena,
There he wrestles and contends with them,
He suffers, sweats, undergoes his great toil and ecstasy.
Earnest and honest, his earnestness springs from thoroughly honest conviction and passionate love of truth.

His main point: contact, touch with his audience,
To trust to the communications of the moment,
To feel the throb—the joy, sadness, expectancy—of the people gathered together.
His heart’s desire is to communicate with the mind of his audience,
To lay hold of it and wield it for some cherished purpose;
Notwithstanding the diversity of minds in such a multitude, by the lightning of eloquence they are melted into one mass,
The whole assembly actuated in one and the same way.

Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards,
Where the city stands that is belov’d by these, and loves them in return and understands them,
There the great city stands.

For oratory, it is great art in a man to be able to triumph on either side of an argument and get applause,
To make the people rage, weep, hate, desire, with yourself,
But the highest art is to be able to triumph only on the right side without regard to applause.
The greatest orator is he who contains always a crowded and critical audience in himself,
And speaks to that invisible house more than to any other—
The oration is to the orator, and comes back most to him.

O what is it in me that makes me tremble so at voices? It has always been one of my chosen delights, from earliest boyhood up, to follow the flights of oratory, listening to orators and oratresses in public halls.
The main question about his matter is “What does it amount to?” But I cannot but admire the manner of giving it utterance—it is so thoroughly natural and spontaneous—just like a stream of pure water, issuing we know not whence, and flowing along we care not how, only conscious of the fact that it is beautiful all the time.

Now I believe that all waits for the right voice;
O voices of greater orators and oratresses, so broad and spacious, launched out with fire,
I pause—I listen for you!
Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice—
Vocal utterance to shake me through and through, and become fix’d in my memory—
Him or her I shall follow, as the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid steps, anywhere around the globe.

Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,
It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?

A call in the midst of the crowd—from my own voice resonant, orotund, sweeping, and final,
(Now the performer launches his nerve,
He has pass’d his prelude on the reeds within.)
One has love for the sound of his own voice—the glad clear sound of one’s own voice,
Somehow it’s always magnetic,
So I have come at last, no more ashamed nor afraid,
Talking like a man unaware that there was ever hitherto such a production as a book, or such a being as a writer.

O to make the most jubilant song!
Open mouth of my soul uttering gladness,
Full of music, full of manhood, womanhood, infancy!
It may be I am destin’d to utter the loudest cries, the winner’s pealing shouts,
Who knows? they may rise from me yet, and soar above everything.

Come my boys and girls, my women, household and intimates,
I am mad with devouring ecstasy to make joyous hymns for the whole earth,
For those who belong here and those to come,
I, exultant to be ready for them, will now shake out carols stronger and haughtier than have ever yet been heard upon earth.

Loud O my throat, and clear O soul!
Erect and haughty this song, its words and scope, free and luxuriant.
I too am not a bit tamed,
I have not felt to warble and trill, however sweetly,
I, exultant, have felt to soar in freedom and in the fulness of power, joy, volition,
And know my omniverous words, and cannot say any less.

While I have a horror of ranting and bawling, I at certain moments let the spirit impulse (demon?) rage its utmost, its wildest, damnedest,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
So capricious and loud my savage song, the voice of full-yielding,
The dirt receding before my prophetical screams.

The air which furnishes me the breath to speak is subtle and boundless,
But what is it compared to the things it serves me to speak—the meanings—
Voice bringing hope and prophecy to the generous races of young and old.

Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised.

I, chanter of pains and joys,
Not to exclude or demarcate, or pick out evils from their formidable masses (even to expose them,)
But to celebrate the immortal and the good.

I make the poem of evil also, I commemorate that part also;
Understand that you cannot keep out of your writing the indication of the evil you entertain in yourself—
No one will perfectly enjoy me who has not some of my own rudeness, sensuality, and hauteur.

Through me forbidden voices, voices of sexes and lusts,
Voices veil’d and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.

 What is known I strip away,
I sing the dark, vast unknown,
Every flash shall be a revelation on the interior and exterior of man or woman,
On the laws of nature, on passive materials,
On what you call death. 

For not my life and years alone I give—all, all I give,
With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds,
To span vast realms of space and time,
Space and time fused in a chant, and the flowing eternal identity.

  NEXT: THE LIMITS OF POETRY

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).