Discover How Whitmans Spiritual Life and Vision Can Enlighten Your OwnWhitmans collected poems and prose are not an object or icon to be gazed upon or revered but a transparency we look through to see ourselves with greater clarity, excitement, and meaning. They wake us up to our potential, to learning about and from ourselves. To experience his writing is to experience ourselves more deeply.from the Preface by Gary David ComstockWal...

Offers insight into Whitmans quest for self-discovery, which involved an ongoing mystical experience of the world.

Aan essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(Thoreau)

Helen Keller, American author, political activist, and lecturer, was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Born in 1880 she fell ill at an early age with an illness, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, which did not last very long yet unfortunately left her both deaf and blind. When Helen was six years old her mother, having been inspired by an account in Charles Dickens’s 'American Notes' of the successful education of another deaf and blind wom...

In 1855, Walt Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a visionary collection of twelve poems. Leaves of Grass is a celebration of life, nature, humanity, and the uniquely American form of mysticism known as Transcendentalism.Leaves of Grass employs a vibrantly innovative style of free verse and explores previously unmentionable subject matter. Glorifying nature, lauding the senses and sexuality, and eulogizing the human body, this maj...

Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its subject. Unlike many other editions of Leaves of Grass, which r...

The verses of Emily Dickinson are produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer’s own mind. Such verse must inevitably forfeit whatever advantage lies in the discipline of public criticism and the enforced conformity to accepted ways.

As featured in AMC's Breaking Bad*, given by Gale Boetticher to Walter White and discovered by Hank Schrader*. "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." So begins Leaves of Grass, the first great American poem and indeed, to this day, the greatest and most essentially American poem in all our national literatu...

The purpose of Life from the very beginning has been dominion- dominion over every adverse circumstance. And through his part of dominion, his nerve cell in the Mind of God and his ability through it to get whatever action he may persistently demand- man HAS dominion over everything. There is a Spark of Divinity in YOU. What are you doing to fan it into flame? Are you giving it a chance to grow, to express itself, to become an all-consuming fire? Are you giving it work to do? Are you makin...