Mostly this we have of God—we have man,
I can comprehend no being more wonderful than man,
There is something curious, indescribably divine, in everyone.
Personality is divine, and gives life and identity to a man or a woman,
It is behind all, everything—his time, his degree of development, his stage of development. 

There is nothing in the universe any more divine than man,
Before the rage of whose passions the storms of heaven are but a breath,
Before whose caprices the lightning is slow and less fatal.
Man, microcosm of all creation’s wildness, terror, beauty, and power, realizes the venerable myth—
He is a god walking the earth; he walks over all.

There is no god any more divine than myself,
Not even God is so great to me as myself is great to me,
That is what the oldest and newest myths finally mean.
If the presence of God were made visible immediately before me, I could not abase myself,
If I walk with Jah in heaven and he assumes to be intrinsically a greater than I, it offends me,
And I shall certainly withdraw from heaven.

O thou transcendent,
Thou pulse, thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,
Shedding forth universes, thou centre of them,
How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak,
If, out of myself, I could not launch, to those, superior universes, becoming already a creator?

I can yet comprehend nothing so tremendous as my own soul,
I am awed even by its works.
It is not consistent with the reality of the soul to admit that there is anything in the known universe more divine than men and women,
The soul addresses God as his equal—as one who knows his own greatness—
The soul must be the judge and standard of the knowledge of God.

If life and the soul are sacred, the human body is sacred,
If anything is sacred the human body is sacred,
The man’s body is sacred, and the woman’s body is sacred,
No matter who it is, it is sacred.

Divine am I inside and out,
And I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,
If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it—
My brain it shall be your occult convolutions,
Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
Root of wash’d sweet-flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate eggs! it shall be you!

Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?
Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones—
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

To be indeed a god! To be this incredible god I am!
To have gone forth among other gods, these men and women I love!
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
The unclothed face is divine—
But only the unclothed body, diviner still, is fully divine.
Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it!
About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas—
The scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer.

None has begun to think how divine he himself is—
The divine mind of man, the divinity of his mouth, or the shaping of his great hands—
Never was average man, his soul, more like a god,
Each of us limitless, no condition is prohibited, not God’s or any.
Anyone may know that the great heroes and poets are divine,
But red, white, black, are all deific,
They who have eyes and can walk are divine, and the blind and lame are equally divine.

I claim for one of those framers over the way framing a house—
The young man there driving the mallet and chisel,
With rolled-up sleeves and sweat on his superb face—
More than Kronos, or Zeus his son, or Hercules his grandson;
Lads ahold of fire engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars,
Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr’d laths, their voices peal through the crash of destruction,
Their foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames;
The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair redeeming sins past and to come,
Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery;
Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels with shirts bagged out at their waists;
The mechanic’s wife with her babe at her nipple interceding for every person born.

Magnifying and applying come I,
Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,
Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself,
Bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see.
I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light,
From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand?
When the psalm sings instead of the singer,
When the script preaches instead of the preacher,
I intend to reach them my hand, and make as much of them as I do of men and women like you, O yourself!

Religion is a part of the identified soul, which, when greatest, knows not bibles in the old way, but in new ways.
We consider bibles and religions divine—I do not say they are not divine,
I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still,
Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth, than they are shed out of you,
It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,
Latent within thee realms of budding bibles equal with any, divine as any.

The sum of all known reverence, the fountain of all naked theology,
All religion, all worship, all the truth to which you are possibly eligible,
I add up in you, whoever you are, and your inherent relations—
Unless the Christ you talk so much of is present in yourselves, here and now, there is no Christ.

What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a hundred ways, but that man or woman is as good as God,
Acknowledging none greater, now or after death, than himself or herself,
O god! O divine average!
There is no god any more divine than yourself.

NEXT: THE PRACTICE OF THE NEW RELIGION

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).