“To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.”

Insisting that a poet's greatness depends on readers willing and able to meet the work · Conversation with Horace Traubel, 1888 (as recorded in With Walt Whitman in Camden)

• Art
• Poetry

“I say the mission of government, henceforth, in civilized lands, is not repression alone, and not Authority alone.”

Rejecting government conceived chiefly as restraint · Essay, Democratic Vistas

• Hope
• Truth

“The poetic quality is not marshal'd in rhyme or uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else, and is in the soul.”

Locating poetry in inner life rather than formal technique · Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855

• Art
• Poetry