Walt Whitman Quotes about Past

All Walt Whitman Quotes Age Aging Army Art Beach Beauty Children Conformity Country Dance Death Democracy Desire Doubt Dying Earth Empathy Evil Exercise Failing Faith Feelings Freedom Friendship Funny Giving Goodness Greatness Growth Happiness Hate Heart Heaven History Humanity Identity Immortality Inspiration Inspirational Journey Joy Judging Knowledge Liberty Life Love Mankind Military Moon Nature Past quotes Perfection Poetry Purpose Quality Reading Reality Sailing School Science Self Esteem Simplicity Sleep Soul Spring Struggle Suffering Summer Sunshine Time Travel Truth Vision Waiting Walking War Water Wealth Writing

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

The Past -- the dark unfathomed retrospect! The teeming gulf --the sleepers and the shadows! The past! the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?

Walt Whitman

Time, Dark, Past

1871 Passage to India, opening verse.

All the past we leave behind; We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O Pioneers!

Walt Whitman

Strong, Past, Pioneers

Walt Whitman (2008). “Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 1860-1867”, p.475, NYU Press

I know nothing grander, better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past, the triumphant result of faith in human kind, than a well-contested American national election.

Walt Whitman

Exercise, Past, America

Walt Whitman (2015). “Complete Prose Works”, p.515, Walt Whitman

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

Walt Whitman

Art, School, Past

Walt Whitman, Floyd Stovall (2007). “Prose Works 1892, Volume II: Collect and Other Prose”, p.365, NYU Press

A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense.... [T]he wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain; But in my soul I plainly heard. Murmuring out of its myriad leaves, Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs - out of its foot-thick bark, That chant of the seasons and time - chant, not of the past only, but of the future.

Walt Whitman

Past, Years, Sky

Walt Whitman, “Song Of The Redwood-Tree”