Whitman: The Secret of It All

There is infinite treasure—
oh! inestimable riches...
And the secret of it all is, 
to write in the gush, the throb, 
the flood, of the moment—
to put things down without 
deliberation—
without worrying about their style—
without waiting for a fit time or place. 

I always worked that way. 

I took the first scrap of paper, 
the first doorstep, the first desk, 
and wrote—wrote, wrote. 

No prepared picture, no elaborated poem, 
no after-narrative, could be what the 
thing itself is. 

You want to catch its first spirit—
to tally its birth. 

By writing at the instant 
the very heart-beat of 
life is caught.