Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.
Walt Whitman Quotes
Simplicity is the glory of expression.
The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express’d in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.
The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.
The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
Lowell was not a great grower – he was a builder. He ‘built’ poems; he didn’t put in the seed, and water the seed, and send down his sun – letting the rest take care of itself: he measured his poems – kept them within the formula.
The great poems, Shakespeare’s included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common man, the life-blood of democracy.
In the broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection.
