Quote

Some of his own closeness to nature, his great love for human beings, was passed on by Whitman to all of us who knew and loved him.

Walt Whitman defended the sacredness of love, the purity of passion - the passion that builds every home and fills the world with art and song.

I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

The eyes of a poet discover in each person a unique and irreplaceable humanity. While arrogant intellect seeks to control and manipulate the world, the poetic spirit bows with reverence before its mysteries.

So much inspires me. People living their lives with courage, beauty of all kinds, nature in all its aspects, people I love and people I hardly know, and, of course, other poets.

The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.

I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.

There's something almost adolescent about Whitman's paean to everything that was and remains good about America.

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.