"I know the formal element in Walt Whitman's poetry found and enormous echo throughout the world. Yet Walt Whitman's significance lies elsewhere. He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization which are apparently either contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena. He said: "Living is the little that is left over from dying." so he gave his whole heart to every leaf of grass. I admire in him the reconciliation of art and nature. When the war between the Northern and Southern States in America, which first really set in motion the power of our present machine world, first broke out, Walt Whitman became a medical orderly. He did what all of us ought to do, particularly today. He helped the weak, the sick and the defeated. He was a Christian and–with a close affinity to us Jews–he was therefore an important measure of the status and worth of humanity."
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Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesJournalists from the United States19th-century poets from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Franz Kafka qtd. in Gustav Janouch Conversations with Kafka (1971), p. 167
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman
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Walt Whitman
1819 – 1892
US-amerikanischer Dichter
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