I am the poet of reality,
I accept reality and dare not question it,
I say that all the things seen are real.
I have split the earth and the hard coal and rocks and the solid bed of the sea,
And went down to reconnoiter there a long time, and bring back a report,
And I understand that those are positive and dense every one,
And that what they seem to the child they are,
And the world is no joke, nor any part of it a sham,
For God does not joke, nor is there any sham in the universe.

I guess I am mainly sensitive to the wonderfulness and perhaps spirituality of things in their physical and concrete expressions.
There is a great deal of heavenly enjoyment in this world that quite attracts my attention away from anything in the world to come, and I believe I shall find nothing in the stars more majestic and beautiful than I have already found on the earth—not more spiritual, not more divine than this earth.

I announce myself the poet of materials and exact demonstration,
Long live exact demonstration!
This is the chemist, this is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician—
Traveling, sailing, measuring space,
Botanizing, dissecting, or making machines,
Materialism first and last imbuing.

Gentlemen I receive you, and attach and clasp hands with you,
To you the first honors always!
Your facts are useful, they stand for realities,
All the things seen or demonstrated are so,
The domestic joys, the daily housework or business, the building of houses, are not phantasms, they have weight, form, location,
Farms, profits, crops, markets, wages, government, are none of them phantasms,
The earth is not an echo, man and his life and all the things of his life are well-consider’d.

And yet they are not my dwelling,
I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling, my realities—
I, who holds duly his triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the aesthetic or intellectual.
Realism is mine—my miracles,
The rapt promises and lumine of seers, the spiritual world,
The witness and albic dawn of things equally real but not yet seen—
What else is so real as mine?

The public has no notion of me as a spiritualistic being. Apart from a few—a very few—no one understands that I have my connections, that they are deep-rooted, that they penetrate phenomena, that I see no object, no expression, no animal, no tree, no art, no book, but I see, from morning to night, and from night to morning, the spiritual.

The physical and the sensuous retain holds upon me which are never entirely releas’d,
And those holds I have not only not denied, but hardly wish’d to weaken.
But a certain spirituality remains—a purity, aspiration;
I believe that much unseen is also here,
How can the ultimate reality of visible things be visible?

How it is I know not, but I often realize a presence—
In clear moods I am certain of it—
An unknown sphere more real than I dream’d, more direct, darts awakening rays about me,
Prophetic spirit of materials shifting and flickering around me,
Contact daily and hourly that will not release me.

Forms, institutions, railroads, telegraphs, factories, stores—
These are but fleeting ephemera,
These alone are nothing, absolutely nothing.
Only the absorbent spirit enveloping, penetrating, going beneath, above, all—
Only this is something.
The spiritual influences back of everything else,
Subtle, unseen, invisible, mainly discredited,
They finally arbitrate the social order.

O spirituality of things!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides,
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings,
You are so dear to me,
I believe you are latent with unseen existences—eidolons.
From all that has touch’d you I believe you have imparted to yourselves living beings,
Separate countless free identities, now doubtless near us in the air, that we know not of,
And now would impart the same secretly to me,
From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces,
And the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me.

There’s a spiritual side of the simplest physical phenomena; not only a spiritual side—more than that—a spiritual outcome. As in the long chain of endless development and growth in the physical world, so in the ethereal world an endless spiritual procession of growth, entering the sphere of the resistless gravitation of spiritual law.

Sure as the earth swims through the heavens,
Does every one of its objects pass into spiritual results!
Out of apparent materialism, an unerring spirituality always and certainly emerges,
Forms, objects, growths, humanities, to spiritual images ripening.
Invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism, through time,
Always new materialism and things, being wafted to spirituality,
All these shows to form and give identity and character to the spiritual identity.

Lo, I or you,
Or woman, man, or state, known or unknown,
We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build,
But really build eidolons,
They the purport and end,
The visible but their womb of birth—
If the spiritual is not behind the material, to what purpose is the material?

I chant materials emanating spirituality,
Celebrate the unknown, the future hidden spiritual world—the real reality.
These carols sung to cheer my passage through the world I see,
For completion I dedicate to the invisible world,
The real being, which is immortal.

I am the true spiritualist; I recognize no annihilation, or death, or loss of identity,
In every object, mountain, tree, and star—in every birth and life,
A mystic cipher waits infolded,
As part of each—evolv’d from each—
The indefinite, the immortal, sublimity,
The blossoms, fruits of ages, orchards divine and certain.

Densities, growth, façades,
Strata of mountains, soils, rocks, giant trees,
Far-born, far-dying, living long,
To leave eidolons everlasting,
Ever the permanent life of life, unfix’d yet fix’d,
Ever shall be, ever have been and are.

It always amazes me when a man of science drifts off into materialism. I look to every man of science to maintain the assertion of omnipresent, unmitigated, never terminable life. When he does anything else I suspect him of being false to his standards of truth. This may sound like inexcusable dogmatism, though I offer it in any but a dogmatic spirit.
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. The elevating and etherealizing ideas of the unknown and of unreality must be brought forward with authority, as they are the legitimate heirs of the known, and of reality, and at least as great as their parents. Soft doctrine is as steady help as stable doctrine.

What is all our material knowledge compared to the vast oceanic volume of unknown spiritual facts, the immensity of unknown being and facts around us, of which we cannot possibly take any cognizance?
A ferment on the surface—how little it may mean!
And observations—how short the road they lead us,
Neither chemistry nor reasoning nor aesthetics will give the least explanation.

True, we must not condemn the show, neither absolutely deny it, for the indispensability of its meanings—
The unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.
But how clearly we see that, migrate in soul to what we can already conceive of superior and spiritual points of view, and, palpable as it seems under present relations, it all and several might, nay certainly would, fall apart and vanish.

Have you no thought, O dreamer, of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks?
(Men and women crowding fast in the streets, if they are not flashes and specks what are they?)
Hast never come to thee an hour, a sudden gleam divine,
The sense of what is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal,
Bursting all these bubbles, fashions, wealth,
These eager business aims, books, politics, art, amours,
To utter nothingness?
Have you no thought that the conventional theories of life, worldly ambition, wealth, office, fame, etc., are essentially but glittering mayas, delusions?

Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul,
That maybe the things I perceive are (as doubtless they are) only apparitions,
That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions, concepts, non-realities.
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands,
For there is a strange unreality about our lives here—
That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be—
I suspect all is but a pageant;
What is the universe, with all its shows, but a phantasm?

What is life itself, but a vestibule?
An exercise, a training and development,
Doubtless for something more real beyond, something in the future,
We know not what, but something as certain as the present is certain.
Nay, who that has reach’d what may be call’d the full vestibule but has had strong suspicions that what we call the present, reality, etc., with all its corporeal shows, may be the illusion, for reasons.
Fear not, my brethren, my sisters, to sound out that conviction brooding within the recesses of every envision’d soul—
Illusions! apparitions! figments all!

Mrs. Hatch says that first exists the spirituality of anything, and that gives existence to things. But Andrew Jackson Davis puts matter as the primary source of all results. Both are quite determined in their theories. Perhaps when they know much more, both of them will be much less determined.

I believe materialism is true and spiritualism is true.
Most writers have disdained the physical world, and they have not overestimated the other, or soul, but have underestimated the corporeal. I preserve the equilibrium of the truth that the material world, and all its laws, are as grand and superb as the spiritual world and all its laws. (Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.)

When I see where the east is greater than the west,
Where the sound man’s part of the child is greater than the sound woman’s part,
Or where a father is more needful than a mother to produce me,
Then I guess I shall see how spirit is greater than matter;
I know that I cannot separate them.

How shall my eye separate the beauty of the blossoming buckwheat field from the stalks and heads of tangible matter?
How shall I know what the life is except as I see it in the flesh?
Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,
You furnish your parts toward the soul,
You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual.

World of the real—world of the twain in one,
Matter and spirit are held together by a central and never-broken unity,
One consistent and eternal purpose.
There is a phase of the real, lurking behind the real, which it is all for,
The material is all for the spiritual—they curiously blend—
And the spiritual, most of all known to my sense, is for the body—and they also blend—
Melange mine own,
Wondrous interplay between the unseen and the seen.

Not a materialist any more than a spiritualist,
I help myself to material and immaterial.
I will make the poems of materials,
For I think they are to be the most spiritual poems,
I will not praise one without the other.

 NEXT: GOOD AND EVIL

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).