Walt Whitman

Life and writing

Walt Whitman lived from 1819 to 1892. The Academy of American Poets documents his work in printing, teaching and journalism, and the first publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855. It also describes his continuing revisions of that collection. Those facts explain why an edition deserves attention when reading a short excerpt. This profile supplies documented lifetime context for the existing archive identity while preserving its undated records and the separate uncertainty of supplied attributions.

A Noiseless Patient Spider moves from an observed creature to an address to the soul, making connection an imaginative undertaking. Quicksand Years instead asks what remains when external arrangements lose their stability. Both poems have checked locations in the linked collection, but their relation to the signed anthology differs. The spider selection uses how where this e-text uses where, and threads where it uses thread. Quicksand Years matches under limited punctuation, case and spacing comparison. These comparisons do not establish which edition an anthology compiler used.

Reading this voice

Begin with A Noiseless Patient Spider and Quicksand Years in full. Compare how each voice handles isolation or uncertainty without making the metaphor a literal rule. The 170 associated records include six signed historical anthology selections and 164 supplied records; the latter remain independently unverified. The linked text’s print edition is unspecified, and the 1855 first-publication fact does not date every poem or archive passage.

Subjects to explore

Words to begin with

• A noiseless, patient spider, I mark'd how on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark'd how to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you, O my soul, where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer threads you fling catch somewhere O my soul.
• Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither, Your schemes, politics fail, lines give way, substances mock and elude me, Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess'd soul, eludes not, One's self must never give way—that is the final substance—that out of all is sure, Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains? When shows break up what but One's self is sure?