I meet new Walt Whitmans everyday. There are a dozen of them afloat. I don't know which Walt Whitman I am.

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 mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet.

We were together. I forget the rest.

Be curious, not judgmental.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.

The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves.