Whitman Poem

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    Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
    It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
    It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
    successions of diseas’d corpses,
    It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
    It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous
    crops,
    It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
    from them at last.
    —Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)