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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Born on May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman is the author of Leaves of Grass...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Poetry
Epistles, Book II, Ars Poetica
by Horace
Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
A Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer
A True Poem
by Lloyd Schwartz
Adam's Curse
by W. B. Yeats, read by James Wright
Always on the Train
by Ruth Stone
Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica (cocoons)
by Dana Levin
Arthur's Anthology of English Poetry
by Laurence Lerner
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov
Blue or Green
by James Galvin
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
by Jane Kenyon
Broadway
by Mark Doty
Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich, read by Anne Waldman
Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Endnote
by Hayden Carruth
Envoi
by William Meredith
Ground Swell
by Mark Jarman
How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual
by Pamela Spiro Wagner
If It All Went Up in Smoke
by George Oppen
Languages
by Carl Sandburg
O Black and Unknown Bards
by James Weldon Johnson
Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
Poetry Is a Destructive Force
by Wallace Stevens
Prefix: Finding the measure
by Robert Kelly
Speech Alone
by Jean Follain
Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
by James Tate
The Art of Poetry [excerpt]
by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
The Bear
by Galway Kinnell
The Composition of the Text
by Adriano Spatola
The Difference between a Child and a Poem
by Michael Blumenthal
The Poem as Mask
by Muriel Rukeyser
The Poems I Have Not Written
by John Brehm
The Uses of Poetry
by William Carlos Williams
This Bridge, Like Poetry, is Vertigo
by Marie Ponsot
What He Thought
by Heather McHugh
Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara
Workshop
by Billy Collins
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The Indications [excerpt]

 
by Walt Whitman

The words of the true poems give you more than poems,   
They give you to form for yourself, poems, religions, politics,
   war, peace, behavior, histories, essays, romances, and everything else,   
They balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes,
They do not seek beauty—they are sought,   
Forever touching them, or close upon them, follows beauty, longing,
   fain, love-sick.   
   
They prepare for death—yet are they not the finish, but rather the outset,   
They bring none to his or her terminus, or to be content and full;   
Whom they take, they take into space, to behold the birth of stars,
   to learn one of the meanings,
To launch off with absolute faith—to sweep through the ceaseless rings,
   and never be quiet again.






From Leaves of Grass, 1900.
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