131 years ago today, Walt Whitman died at age 72.
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Here is one of his most famous exhortations, from the preface to Leaves of Grass:
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
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Many years ago, I worked at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, located in the historic Patent Office Building in D.C., the very same place where Whitman himself tended to wounded Civil War soldiers. You could sense his presence there. The museum owns the 1875 chalk on paper drawing, shown above, of Whitman by Thomas Wilmer Dewing. The drawing is not often on display, but I would regularly ask the curators to retrieve it and let me have a look. I’ve never known another drawing to have such life to it.
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For a reading of the above text, watch this video:
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Author: Terence Winch
