Our ideas of beauty need to be radically changed, and made anew for today’s purposes. Perhaps one of the missions of both priest and poet, for the modern, is to break down the old conventions, the barriers, so narrowly restricting the ideas of beauty. It will all come in due time.

Great is today, and beautiful,
Through the clear atmosphere I stretch around on the wonderful beauty,
All seems beautiful to me, all the wondrous flow of beauty,
The universe is a procession with beautiful motion,
Each precise object, condition, combination, process, exhibits a beauty,
The multiplication table its—old age its—the carpenter’s trade its—the grand opera its,
The large harmonies of government gleam with theirs,
And the commonest definite intentions and actions with theirs.

I think ten million supple-fingered gods are perpetually employed hiding beauty in the world,
Burying it everywhere in everything,
And most of all in spots that men and women do not think of, and never look.
I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world,
There is enough of unaccountable importance and beauty in every step we tread,
I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Why should we go hunt beauty then?
Where can you go to get away from it?
The world is full of beauty for you, if you approach it in the right spirit,
Thine eyes, ears—all thy loftiest attributes—all that takes cognizance of natural beauty, shall wake and fill—
Be happy going forth, seeing all the beautiful perfect things.

Every hour of the day and night, every acre of the earth and shore, and every point or patch of the sea and sky, is full of pictures, alive, every part in its best light. No two of this immortal brood are alike; except that they are all of unspeakable beauty and perfection, and large or small alike, descend into that greedy something in man whose appetite is more undying than hope, and more insatiate than the sand with water, the greed that, with perfect complaisance, devours all things.

The fruition of beauty is no chance of hit or miss,
It is inevitable as life—it is as exact and plumb as gravitation,
Whatever happens to anyone may become beautiful,
Whatever happens to anybody it may be turn’d to beautiful results.
Nor of all the beautiful things of the universe is there any more beautiful than truth—
Man has not art enough to make the truth repulsive.

What is beauty? Beauty is simply health. All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.

There’s a beautiful woman—she is not beautiful alone or chiefly because of her eyes, her complexion, the mellowness of her body, though these, too, play their parts, but because of a certain unity, atmosphere, a certain balance of light and shade, which accounts for every detail—finally gives the detail its proper environment, takes leave of the detail in the whole.
This is the reason that about the proper expression of beauty there is precision and balance—one part does not need to be thrust above another.

True art, identical with the perception of the beauty that there is in all the ordinations as well as all the works of nature, is one, is not partial, but includes all times and forms and sorts. The law of the requisites of any complete workmanship is the average and superb beauty of the ensemble. 
(But nearly all pictures distort things from the harmony and equilibrium of nature. That is why the moderns are so inferior in art—we want pretty verbiage, part of a poem or a picture, without reference to the whole.)

Of the arts, as music, poems, architecture, and the rest, they are in their way to provoke soothing and solemnly placed influences. They are to seek this delight of the soul where it waits, for I see that it always patiently waits.
The excellence of a work of art consists principally in its capability of provoking thought and pleasure in the mind. The influence of beautiful works of art pervades the minds, and in due time the actions and character, of all who come in contact with them. The invisible sway of even a picture has sometimes controlling influence over a man’s character and future life.

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,
(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?)
What salutary and purifying and bracing effects architecture might have—
It gives perpetual lessons of strength, grace, proportion, equilibrium.

There is always a strange fascination in portraits. It is singular what a peculiar influence is possessed by the eye of a well painted portrait. It has a sort of magnetism—human eyes gazing silently but fixedly upon you, and creating the impression of an immense phantom concourse—speechless and motionless, but yet realities. You are indeed in a new world—a peopled world, though mute as the grave. What tales might those pictures tell, if their mute lips had the power of speech.

To the artist has been given the command to go forth into all the world and preach the gospel of beauty. A sublime moral beauty is present to them, and may almost be said to emanate from the pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s face.
We need a man who sees the flesh but does not make a man all flesh—all of him body. It is necessary for an artist to see everything—to go to the depths of life.
The perfect man is the perfect artist, he sees new beauties everywhere.

All ways are good ways if they pan out well—that is a good, the only, principle to apply to art. But the cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one.
All great rebels and innovators exhibit the highest phases of the artistic spirit. He or she is greatest who contributes the greatest original practical example—especially if their intellectual majesty bears itself out with calmness amid popular odium or circumstances of cruelty and an infliction of suffering.

The fellow who makes a dead set at beauty by itself is in a bad way. My idea is that beauty is a result, not an abstraction.
Think of it—art for art’s sake. Let a man really accept that—let that really be his ruling thought—and he is lost. Instead of regarding art and literature as only a weapon, an instrument, in the service of something larger than itself, it looks upon itself as an end—as a fact to be finally worshipped, adored. To me that’s all a horrible blasphemy—a bad-smelling apostasy.

Art for art’s sake, like literature for literature’s sake, I object to, because literature created on such a principle, and art as well, removes us from humanity. I think of art as something to serve the people—the mass—with that last impalpable ethic purpose from the artist (most likely unconscious to himself) below all, as all great art must have. When it fails to do that it’s false to its promises.

We could wish the spreading of a sort of democratical artistic atmosphere. I think, all—the Italian laborer on the street, the woman with her child, the curbstones out here—all is for art.
It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. The taste for pictorials is one of those developments of the imaginative quality which is fed in childhood, and in a great degree is common alike to all classes, one which resides in quite every man.

We wish some plan could be formed which would result in a perpetual free exhibition of works of art, which would be open to all classes. All public exhibitions of paintings, statuary, etc., diffuse more or less of the refinement and spiritual elegance which are identified with art.
Let every family have some flowers, some choice prints, and some sculpture casts; as to prints, there are innumerable ones that can be purchased for a small sum, good enough for any man’s parlor.

If we are met with the ready rejoinder, that it is hard enough for poor folk to earn the necessaries of life, let alone things which you can neither eat or wear, we still say that, in the life we live upon this beautiful earth, there may, after all, be something vaster and better than dress and the table. The bread and beef should not always be allowed to carry the day. The higher appetite, the appetite for beauty and the intellectual, must be consulted too.

NEXT: THE BEAUTY OF NATURE AND PEOPLE

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).