Monday, May 3, 2010

passionate tenacity

"The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, sea-faring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people.... The poetic quality is not marshalled 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."

- Walt Whitman (from the preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855 ed.)

No comments:

Post a Comment