My whole work, my life, manners, friendships, writing, all have an evident purpose. Sometimes I wonder if “Leaves of Grass” has any one lesson, any one purpose; whether it hasn’t a thousand, a legion. After completing my poems, I am curious to review them in the light of their own (at the time unconscious, or mostly unconscious) intentions. 

The main object of my poetry is simply to put a person—a man before all, myself, typical, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in America—freely, fully, and truly on record;
To articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic personality;
To exploit that personality, identified with place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive sense than any hitherto poem or book;
To express the eternal bodily, composite, cumulative, natural character of one man’s identity, ardors, observations, faiths, and thoughts—
A common individual New World private life, its birth and growth, its goings and comings, its esthetic, moral, social, and political idiosyncrasies. 

Assuming to himself all the attributes of his country, steps Walt Whitman into literature—an attempt of a live, naive, masculine, tenderly affectionate, rowdyish, contemplative, sensual, moral, susceptible, and imperious person to cast into literature not only his own grit and arrogance, but his own flesh and form, undraped, regardless of modesty or law, ignorant or silently scornful of all except his own presence and experience—to stamp a new type of character, namely my own, and indelibly fix it and publish it—not for a model but for purposes of illustration, for the present and future, of American letters and American young men. 

The distinctive and ideal type of Western character (consistent with the operative political and even money-making features of United States’ humanity) has not yet appear’d. I have allow’d the stress of my poems from beginning to end to assist it. Their aim is character, to arouse that something in the reader which we call character—what I sometimes call heroism.
(Some of my friends say it is a sane, strong physiology; I hope it is. But physiology is a secondary matter.) 

The whole drift of my book is to form a new race of fuller, yet unknown characters, men and women, for the United States to come. This is undoubtedly its essential purpose and its key. This is what I have been after—
To suggest the substance and form of a large, sane, perfect human being;
To present the portraiture or model of a sound, large, complete, intellectual and spiritual man and woman, receiving its impetus from the democratic spirit, nature, the passions, pride;
To combine tenderness and trembling, sympathetic manliness with strength and perfect reason.

Taken as a unity, “Leaves of Grass,” true to its American origin, is the song of a great composite democratic individual, male or female, (I want them to be the poems of women entirely as much as men;)
A gigantic embryo or skeleton of personality for American use;
A type-portrait for living, active, worldly, healthy personality, modern and free, joyful and potent, through the long future—in the midst of, and tallying, current America, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days.

Perhaps such free strains are to give to these United States, or commence giving them, the especial nourishments which, though all solid and mental and moral things are in boundless profusion provided, have hardly yet begun to be provided for them.

“Leaves Of Grass” may be described as the song of the sovereignty of one’s-self, the song of entire faith in all that belongs to a man, body and soul. Like all modern tendencies, it has direct or indirect reference continually to you or me, to the central identity of everything, the mighty ego. It must place in the van, and hold up at all hazards, the banner of the divine pride of man in himself.

The book is a gospel of self-assertion and self-reliance for every American reader—which is the same as saying it is the gospel of democracy. Perhaps the chief and final clue to these poems is the determined attempt or resolution to put democracy into an imaginative and poetical statement—nay it is certain that this is the underlying purpose.
Every page of my book—we might almost say every line—emanates democracy, absolute, unintermitted, without the slightest compromise, as if, somehow, a great coming and regnant democracy had here given genesis to every page and line.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you, I am trilling these songs,
Infinitesimals out of my life, and many a life,
To illustrate America—illustrate the whole, not merely sections—
To invigorate democracy.

My main and chief, however indefinite, claim for any page of mine would be its derivation, or seeking to derive itself, from the average quality of the American bulk, the people, and getting back to it again. This determined resolution or idea pervades the whole like some indigenous scent, and, to a fine nostril, will be detected in every page.
The theme is really of the first importance—and all the rest can be broached and led to through it, as well as any other way. 

The deepest moral, social, political purposes of America are the underlying endeavors at least of my pages—a man in perfect health here comes forward, devoting his life to the experiment of singing the New World in a new song. I would sing, and leave out or put in, quite solely with reference to a subjective and contemporary point of view appropriate to ourselves alone, and to our new genius and environments, different from anything hitherto. 

Poetry: Where else indeed may we so well investigate the causes, growths, tally-marks of the time—the age’s matter and malady—diagnosing this disease called humanity?
But I will take all those things that produce this condition and make them produce as great characters as any.

I have unconsciously sought, by indirections at least as much as directions, to express the whirls and rapid growth and intensity of the United States—and largely the spirit of the whole current world—my time, for I feel that I have partaken of that spirit.

While the pieces were put forth and sounded especially for my own country, the substances and subtle ties behind them, and which they celebrate, belong equally to all countries. And the ambition to waken with them the latent echoes of every land, I here avow—to map out, fashion, form and knit, and sing the ideal American, as a type for those passions, joys, workings, etc. in all the human race, at least as shown under modern and especially American auspice.
The purpose beneath the rest in my book is hearty comradeship, for individuals to begin with, and for all the nations of the earth as a result.  

This book to be the poem of average identity—
Of yours, whoever you are, now reading these lines—
The lights and shades and sights and joys and pains and sympathies common to humanity,
The great drama going on within myself and every human being—myself, typical, before all.
In the bottom meanings of “Leaves of Grass” there is plenty of room for all,
And I, for my part, include not only anarchists, socialists, whatnot, but queens and aristocrats. 

From another point of view “Leaves of Grass” is avowedly the song of sex and amativeness.
I do not chant in my poems the divinity of the brain and spirit of a man only, but the divinity of the animal,
The life of flesh and blood and physical urge, and even animalism,
Fit for men and women with the attributes of throbbing blood and flesh—
But all is lifted into a different light and atmosphere.

One deep purpose has underlain the plan of my poems, and that has been the religious purpose,
For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising inclusive and more resplendent—
The greatness of love and democracy, and the greatness of religion. 

One main genesis-motive of the “Leaves” was my conviction that the crowning growth of the United States is to be spiritual and heroic. To help start and favor that growth—or even to call attention to it, or the need of it—is the beginning, middle, and final purpose of the poems, the seed I have sought to plant in them. This basic purpose has never been departed from in the composition of my verses. I am held to the heavens and all the spiritual world and to the identities of the gods, after what they have done to me, suggesting themes.

I think the “Leaves” the most religious book among books, crammed full of faith. What would the “Leaves” be without faith? An empty vessel. Faith is its very substance—its one article of assent—its one item of assurance.
Add the word modernness, and you begin to unlock “Leaves of Grass.” 

I could not have written a word of the “Leaves” without its religious root-ground. Religious canticles, hymns of ecstasy and religious fervor, perhaps ought to be the brain, the living spirit—elusive, indefinite, indescribable—of all the “Leaves of Grass.” 

I wanted the book to stand for, to testify to, the multifariousness of the universe,
To include, combine, celebrate, all—not the least jot missed,
To utter the bad as well as the good,
To participate in the common, the outcast, along with the high, the elect—
And to see care, oversight, everywhere, the divine working through it all,
Never an ending—the purpose vital, evident, inveterate, to the end.

The message of the “Leaves,” if any, is relationship—the fact of relationship,
Infinite relationships—the immortality of relationship.

Poetry will be revivified by this tremendous innovation, the cosmic spirit, which must henceforth be the background and underlying impetus, more or less visible, of all first-class songs—not to be construed as an intellectual or scholastic effort or poem mainly, but more as a radical utterance out of the emotions and the physique—poems like new systems of orbs, balanced upon themselves, revolving in limitless space, more subtle than the stars. 

I suppose every man has his purposes,
I had mine—to have no purpose.
(Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.)
“Leaves of Grass” never started out to do anything—has no purpose,
It is reflection, it is statement, it is to see and tell,
To state, to capture, the drift of a life,
To let things flow in, one after another, take their places, their own way;
This way, you see, I am a spectator, too.

I, myself, often stand in astonishment before the book—am defeated by it,
Lost in its curious revolutions, its whimsies, its overpowering momentum,
Lost as if a stranger,
Driving about with it, knowing nothing of why or result.
I have always thought that it escapes me myself, its own author,
As to what it means, and what it is after, and what it drifts at.

Yet the book which has been the object of my whole life has at last got a fair hold on the public mind. I consider the point that I have positively gain’d a hearing to far more than make up for any and all other lacks and withholdings. Essentially, that was from the first, and has remain’d throughout, the main object.

Then falter not O book, sent out into this garden the world,
Speed on, spread your white sails my little bark athwart the imperious waves,
Chant on, sail on, fulfill your destiny,
Purpos’d I know not whither, yet ever full of faith.

NEXT: POETRY, NATURE, AND SCIENCE

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).