Where you hold me enchain’d a certain time refusing to give me up, While yet incessantly asking still I adhere to my city,ĭay upon day and year upon year O city, walking your streets, These to procure incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart, These demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears only, Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the Give me for marriage a sweet-breath’d woman of whom I should never tire, Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars, Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape, Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows, Give me autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard, Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,

Allen Crawford from ‘Whitman Illuminated.’ Click image for more. Penned in 1867, more than a decade after his iconic Leaves of Grass was published, the short poem compresses in a few lines Whitman’s boundless capacity for exaltation and embodies the “expression of primal joy” that defines his writing.

Scott Fitzgerald, and dozens more, edited by Barbara Cohen, Seymour Chwast and Steven Heller - comes a succulent love letter to the city from 48-year-old Walt Whitman. But the most beautiful are invariably the poetic.įrom the wonderful 1987 collection New York Observed: Artists and Writers Look at the City ( public library) - a compendium of lore and perspectives on Gotham dating back to 1650 and featuring such luminaries as Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry Miller, F. New York City is not want for homages and celebrations - the deeply personal, the illustrated, the photographic, the cartographic, even the canine and the feline.

To the splendid city