What will be the result of this years hence?
Whether I shall complete what is here started,
Whether I shall dart forth the true rays, the ones that wait unfired,
Whether I shall attain my own height, to justify these, yet unfinished,
Whether I shall make the poem of the New World, transcending all others,
Depends, rich persons, upon you—
Have I proved myself strong by provoking strength out of you?
Have you gone aside after listening to me, and created for yourself?

I have but one central figure, the general human personality typified in myself. But I seek to behold and exhibit these material, aesthetic, and spiritual relations I am, as specimen to all, and tally the same in you, whoever you are. My book compels, absolutely necessitates, every reader to transpose him or herself into that central position, and become the living fountain, actor, experiencer himself or herself, of every page, every aspiration, every line.

What is the little I have done, except to arouse you? Not to describe things outside you, but to arouse that which is in you. All I write, I write to arouse in you a great personality. It is in you—this I repeat over and over.

O poets to come, orators, singers, musicians to come! I depend on you!
Not today, not merely what I tell, is to justify me,
You, a new brood, native, athletic, greater than before known,
Arouse! for you must justify me,
What I provoke from you and from ensuing times—a movement in which I am only an episode—is to justify me.

So I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me.
Most writers who have anything to say have a splendid theory and scheme,
And something they want to put forth,
I, on the contrary, have no scheme, no cocked and primed system,
No axe to grind, no theory to expound,
I have no chair, no church, no nothing.

I will not be a great philosopher and found any school, and build it with iron pillars, and make disciples,
That new superior churches and politics shall come.
Were all educations practical and ornamental well displayed out of me, what would it amount to?
Were I as the head teacher or charitable proprietor or wise statesman, what would it amount to?
If we sat here together and they called me master I’d feel like a fool.

I do not teach a definite philosophy—
Plenty of philosophy but not a philosophy,
I am not Anarchist, not Methodist, not anything you can name.
The last thing the world needs is a cut and dried philosophy,
And the last man to announce a cut and dried philosophy would be Walt Whitman.
Yet I see why all the ists and isms and haters and dogmatists exist, can see why they must exist, and why I must include all. My philosophy is to include all other philosophies, hospitable to all forms of thought.

Including all philosophies, as I do, how could I nail myself to any one or single specimen?
Let others finish specimens, I never finish specimens,
I start them by exhaustless laws as nature does,
Indicating not only themselves but successive productions out of themselves, fresh and modern continually.

It is one of my dreads that there may come a time, and people, to exposit, explicate, “Leaves of Grass,” explicating this, that, the other, as if there was no doubt in the world about it—a “Leaves of Grass” creed, boards of explicators—”This line means this, and that line means that, and God damn you for a fool if you don’t say so too.”

I charge you forever reject those who would expound me,
For I cannot expound myself;
I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free,
I adopted no creeds, never joined parties; I was always free;
I don’t want you to evangelize for me—
I’d rather not have anybody evangelized into a belief in “Leaves of Grass.”

Who is he that would become my follower?
Who wants to be any man’s mere follower?
Let none be content with me,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,
Nor look through the eyes of the dead,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
I encourage you to subject me and my words to the strongest tests of any.

I have established nothing for good,
I have but established these things, till things farther onward shall be prepared to be established,
And I am myself the preparer of things farther onward—
After me, vista!

As I have announced each age for itself, this moment I set the example,
My words are less the reminders of properties told,
And more the reminders of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,
Every passage tells of an interior not always seen,
Exudes an impalpable something which sticks to him that reads,
Pervades and provokes him to tread the half-invisible road where the poet, like an apparition, is striding fearlessly before.

“Leaves of Grass” may be only an indication—a forerunner—a barbaric road-breaker—less accomplishment than preparation. I would liken it to the awakening of thoughts, the signal of a great march: Walt Whitman announces the coming after him of great successions of poets, and that he but lifts his finger to give the signal.
The service , in fact, if any, must be to break a sort of first path or track, no matter how rude and ungeometrical.  The paths to the house I seek to make, but leave to those to come the house itself. And I charge the young that succeed me to train themselves and acquire terrible voices for disputes of life and death—and be ready to respond to whatever needs response.

These poems are both offspring and parents of superior offspring,
Like other primitive surveyors, I must do the best I can, leaving it to those who come after me to do much better.
I myself seek a man better than I am, or a woman better than I am,
I invite defiance, and to make myself superseded,
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own.

I demand the choicest edifices to destroy them;
I have offer’d my style to everyone,
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
All I have done, I would cheerfully give to be trod under foot,
If it might only be the soil of superior poems,
And bravas to him or her who, coming after me, achieves the work in triumph.

NEXT: THE POET’S PARTING WORDS 

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).