I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes . . . . the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume . . . . it has no taste of the distillation . . . . it is
odorless,
It is for my mouth forever . . . . I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echos, ripples, and buzzed whispers . . . . loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration . . . . the beating of my heart . . . . the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and darkcolored sea- rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice . . . . words loosed to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses . . . . a few embraces . . . . a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides,
The feeling of health . . . . the full-noon trill . . . . the song of me rising from bed
and meeting the sun.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)
ONCE you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the sub-strata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender be cause I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I bad not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. It was a purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I never helped any one expecting that it would do any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs the seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted; it was something to make me puke. I bad no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would met him calmly and spit in His face.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn (1939)
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I have a website devoted to Walt Whitman
https://rogerwsmithswaltwhitmansite.blog/
and have posted about Henry Miller
‘
In early stages of their careens, the following novels were written by Whitman and Miller:
Whitman
Franklin Evans or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842)
Life and Adventures of Jack Engle (1852)
Miller
Moloch Or, This Gentle World (1927)
Crazy Cock (1928-1930)
These early works are of historical interest. One can learn about these two writers and their times from them.
But …
They are not CONVINCING, do not RESONATE. It takes some patience to read them.
Both writers had to find their own voices. It was not to be fiction the third person, narration per se, or description. They had to address the reader directly, talking about THEMSELVES.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
April 2026
