“Never was anything more wanted than, to-day, and here in the States, the poet of the modern is wanted.”

Calling for poetry adequate to contemporary life · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Poetry
• Time

“To-day, ahead, though dimly yet, we see, in vistas, a copious, sane, gigantic offspring.”

Expressing confidence in possibilities not yet fully visible · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Hope
• Time

“For our New World I consider far less important for what it has done, or what it is, than for results to come.”

Judging a society by its unrealised possibilities · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Hope
• Time

“He learns the lesson—he places himself where the future becomes present.”

Presenting poetic imagination as a meeting-place of present and future · Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855

• Poetry
• Time

“The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be, from what has been and is.”

Giving poetry a role in joining memory, present experience and possibility · Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855

• Poetry
• Time

“Past and present and future are not disjoin'd but join'd.”

Seeing time as a continuum rather than separate compartments · Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855

• Memory
• Time

“The American poets are to enclose old and new, for America is the race of races.”

Calling poetry to hold past and present together · Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855

• Poetry
• Time

“Poetry, like a grand personality, is a growth of many generations—many rare combinations.”

Situating poetic genius within long cultural inheritance rather than sudden invention · Conversation with Horace Traubel, 1888 (as recorded in With Walt Whitman in Camden)

• Poetry
• Time