I’ve kicked this page off by offering a quote I love from Walt Whitman…won’t you add to it by offering some quotes that speak to you? Insert quotes from any of our readings into the comment box of this page…then I’ll integrate them into the body of the page (giving you credit, of course!).
“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 numbers of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine 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….”
–Walt Whitman, from the 1855 preface to his Leaves of Grass
“America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on a tree. America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities are closed to him. We are all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate–We are America!”
Marybeth Richards says
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose?
Professor, When I was in third grade I took a creative writing class at a local church because I was home-schooled. At the time, I thought I was so prophetic and ahead of my time because I had this crazy idea for a piece I could write about through the eyes of the grass over hundreds of years. The weight it felt, the faces of men who fell, who died, children who asked curious questions atop of it. If grass could speak, there may not be so many secrets. Reading this stanza in Whitman’s Song of Myself just gave me joy and a reminiscent moment of an idea gone by that maybe I ought to rethink.
ALISON JAENICKE says
Thanks for your comment, Maria–glad you like the quote. It’s NOT in our book because our 7th edition of the Norton Anthology only includes the 1881 edition, not the preface to the 1855 edition, which this is taken from. (There have been 6–or 9, depending how you count them–editions of Leaves of Grass.)
MARIA CHRISTINE ZAPOTOCKY says
I’m not sure why, but today was the first time I looked at this page of our class blog. I absolutely love the comment you chose from Whiman, Alison. Was this particular quote in Norton’s Anthology? I don’t remember reading it.
For me, it encompasses all that I strive to be and do in this life. It displays the importance of holding reverence for everything God created, including ourselves, the importance of treating others as you would have them treat you regardless of the labels life places upon us and the importance of listening to that still small voice inside you that guides and directs you.
It also brought me back to our readings of Washinton and Du Bois and how they fought to right the wrongs of discrimination and to provide equality for all.