The art of art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. The style of expression must be carefully purged of anything striking or dazzling or ornamental, and with great severity precluded from all that is eccentric. The great poets are to be known by the absence in them of tricks.

Too much attempt at ornament is the blur upon nearly all literary styles. The temporary prevalent theory and practice of poetry is merely one-sided and ornamental and dainty—a love-sigh, a bit of jewelry, a feudal conceit, an ingenious tale or intellectual finesse, adjusted to the low taste and calibre that will always sufficiently generally prevail—(ranges of stairs necessary to ascend the higher.)

Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost,
Anything is most beautiful without ornament.
The best writing has no lace on its sleeves,
The poetic quality blooms simple and earnest as the laws of the world,
Only that which is simply earnest, unadorned, unvarnished, laconic, taciturn, preserves perfect calmness and sanity.  
(But those ornaments can be allowed that conform to the perfect facts of the open air and that flow out of the nature of the work and come irrepressibly from it and are necessary to the completion of the work.)  

Rule in all poems and other writings: Make it plain. Do not undertake to say anything, however plain to you, unless you are positive you are making it perfectly plain to those who hear or read. Perfect transparent clearness, sanity, and health are wanted. Nothing will do, not one word or sentence, that is not perfectly clear, with positive purpose. I delight to make a poem where I feel clear that not a word but is indispensable part thereof and of my meaning.

Lumber the writing with nothing,
Nothing for beauty’s sake, no euphemism,
Nothing splendid or pretty or startling,
(I know of nothing I think so little of as pretty words, pretty thought, pretty china, pretty arrangements.)
Let it go as lightly as a bird flies in the air,
Flow on unhasting and unresting as a fish swims in the ocean,
That is the divine style—O if it can be attained!

To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art. If you have looked on him who has achieved it you have looked on one of the masters of the artists of all nations and times. 

The greatest poet has less a marked style and is more the channel of thoughts and things without increase or diminution, and is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains; I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. No schemes, no fanciful, delicate, elegant constructiveness—no damn art! Undecked with sentimentalism, or jingle, or nice conceits or flowery similes. No ornamental similes at all, not one, especially no ornamental adjectives, unless they have come molten hot, and imperiously prove themselves, faithful to the perfect likelihoods of nature.

No quotations (quoting is a thing that gets to be a disease) and no reference to any other writers. No illustrations whatever from the ancients or classics, nor from mythology, nor from the royal and aristocratic institutions and forms of Europe. No puns, funny remarks, double entendres, ironies, sarcasms; I have very little liking for deliberate wits—for men who start out to be funny. (Did you ever know me to pun? It’s not in my line at all. I am guilty of most real bad sins, but that bad sin I never acquired.)

No rhyme—nature doesn’t teach us in that way. Look out this window! Yonder are foliage of various colors, successions irregular of landscapes, water now, now height, an abrupt sail, a sudden bird piping. They are not in cadences or measures; some are long, some short. It is the chorus of all these, the harmony of their dissimilarity, that please.
The profit of rhyme is that it drops seeds of a sweeter and more luxuriant rhyme. But the audible rhyme soon nauseates. The inaudible rhyme is delicious without end.

Was’t charged against my chants they had forgotten art? The lyrist’s measur’d beat, the wrought-out temple’s grace, column and polish’d arch forgot? In these “Leaves” nothing is poetized. (I had great trouble in leaving out the stock “poetical” touches—but succeeded at last.) What I am after is the content not the music of words. Perhaps the music happens—it does no harm—but I do not go in search of it. I should prefer to have the lilt present with the idea, but if I got down my thought and the rhythm was not there I should not work to secure it.

In the “Leaves of Grass” the blades are of unequal length, but they are ever fresh and beautiful, and full of sweet nutriment. Its verses are the liquid, billowy waves, ever rising and falling. See, on the one side the western sea and on the other the eastern sea, how they advance and retreat upon my poems as upon their own shores—perhaps sunny and smooth, perhaps wild with storm, always moving, always alike in their nature as rolling waves, but hardly any two exactly alike.
The rhythm and uniformity are concealed in the roots of the verses, showing the free growth of metrical laws, and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs and roses on a bush, and take shapes compact as the shapes of melons, or chestnuts, or pears, and shed the perfume impalpable to form.

The effects I produce are no effects of artists or the arts, but effects of the original eye or arm, or the actual atmosphere or grass or brute or bird. You may feel the unconscious teaching of the presence of some fine animal, but will never feel the teaching of the fine writer or speaker.

What I tell I tell for precisely what it is—
Exact, simple, no twistified or foggy sentences at all,
Not so much to produce an effect, or that at all,
But to state the case—the case of the universe,
To see and tell, to seize upon its typical phasings.

Language itself as language I have discounted—would have rejected it altogether but that it serves the purpose of vehicle, is a necessity—our mode of communication. But my aim has been to so subordinate it that no one could know it existed—as in fine plate glass one sees the objects beyond and does not realize the glass between.
What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. Everything is literally photographed—the most translucid clearness without variation—my determination being to make the story of man, his physiological, emotional, spiritual self, tell its own story unhindered by artificial agencies.

I send no agent or medium,
I offer no representative of value,
But offer the value itself.

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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).