One deep purpose has underlain the plan of my poems—and that has been the religious purpose,
There is just no real and permanent grandeur, nor character nor life worthy the name, without religion,
Nor land nor man or woman without religion, sole worthiest elevator of man or state.

I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake,
In it I clearly see the first, the last, the deepest depths and highest heights of art, of literature, and of the purposes of life,
I claim everything for religion—
After the claims of my religion are satisfied nothing is left for anything else. 

But religion, the noblest religion, is not a complete edifice in itself,
It is the array of coping, the last crown and finish, the top of towers and pinnacles,
Raised at last, on many edifices, many foundations and substructures.
There can be no sane and complete personality, nor any grand and electric nationality, without the element of religion imbuing all the other elements—chiefest, most indispensable, most exhilarating element, to which the others are to be adjusted.

In the higher structure of a human self or of community, the moral, the religious, the spiritual, is strictly analogous to heat in chemistry, invisible itself, but the life of all visible life, inside of all human character, and education, and affairs, like the subtle vitalization call’d health in the physiologic structure.

What are you doing young man?
Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art, amours?
Your ambition or business whatever it may be?
It is well—against such I say not a word, I am their poet also.
But behold! each is not for its own sake,
Such swiftly subside, burnt up for religion’s sake,
For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential life of the earth,
Any more than such are to religion.
As fuel to flame, and flame to the heavens,
So must wealth, science, materialism—even this democracy of which we make so much—unerringly feed the highest mind, the soul.

I approach the sublimest and most spiritual facts as, even in their littlest beginnings, impenetrable mysteries,
And yet with audacious hand to be seized upon and wrestled with.
But beware! beware!
Know, once for all, they are not true as truths,
For there is another truth than the literal truth.

These mysterious and ever-elusive subjects are useful as fine spiritual exercises or promising spiritual hypotheses—suggestive, elevating, and clarifying,
Precious beyond account as soaring up, beyond the demonstrable, the practical,
But leaving the divine secrets just as inexplicable and unreachable as before—maybe more so;
The real truth is no doubt infinitely beyond all these little broken and jangled hints.

NEXT: THE OLD RELIGIONS

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).