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If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere — probably more than the rest of the world combined.
Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.

— Walt Whitman Complete Prose Works (1892)

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Poetry

More quotes by Walt Whitman

I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.

Complete Prose Works (1892)

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Walt Whitman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.