This Is What You Shall Do by Walt Whitman | Poems Rethabile Likes
"This Is What You Shall Do"
Read by RedFrost Motivation
What does it mean to live a life worthy of poetry? Whitman answers in this prose manifesto — a call to love the earth, stand up for the broken, and trust your own soul above all creeds. It is the preface that changed American poetry forever, and it still sounds like a challenge.
This Is What You Shall Do
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
Whitman's Leaves of Grass isn't a book of poems — it is a body. He wanted to sing not just with words but with the whole self: flesh, breath, motion, silence. This preface is the key to that project. It asks us to live as poetry before we write it, in a lot of ways like the character of Robin Williams in that everlasting film Dead Poets Society (1989). In other words... we shall be generous, curious, undaunted and yes, ballsy too. We must treat our very own soul as the ultimate authority. One small expression: carpe diem!
Every time I read it, I feel invited back to something primal and large. That's what makes it great — not just as a statement, but as a way of being.
— Rethabile
Video transcript: Walt Whitman's "This Is What You Shall Do"
This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
Video source: YouTube, RedFrost Motivation. Duration approximately 2 minutes.
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