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 toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or 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, re-examine 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.
—Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855
Notes from the Dreamtime 
Thanks for the reminder.
Whitman is nearly my favorite poet, second only to Wallace Stevens, who drove me to poetry as an educational choice and means of expression. Love of life for and of itself just floods from Whitman’s pages, and I’m always astonished by how much his words have in common with the Buddha’s. This quote is actually advice to poets specifically, but it certainly has wider applications, and I doubt Whitman himself would have disliked that.
Sublime. There’s a poem of his, I think it was called “For a Child on a Beach” or something like that. I’ll have to look it up, and I should memorize it.
While I can read this again and again, while I can take this to my soul, I admit to having trouble with this line: stand up for the stupid. Perhaps stupid meant something different then. Perhaps i am thinking of ignorance. Yes, I think I am. He said nothing about standing up for those who close their eyes and chose not see, close their ears and choose not to hear.
Among the songs I sing to myself, among those I have committed to memory is “This of Beauty” by Dave Nachmanoff. A Ph.D. in philosophy (is that redundant?), he left his professorial post to play music. I MCed his last show in South Florida, fresh from the Kennedy Center. One song stuck with me. Here are the lyrics:
Thing of Beauty
I’d like to make a sculpture out of glass
So beautiful, that it could make you cry
But when I look out at the snowflakes
That fall against my window
I cannot seem to bring myself to try
I just can’t seem to bring myself to try
Chorus:
To make a thing of beauty
Just one thing of beauty
Only for an instant
With truth and with love
To make a thing of beauty
Just one thing of beauty
A single thing of beauty
And that would be enough
I’d like to weave a tapestry of yarn
So intricate, that it could break your heart
But when I look out at that web
As it’s shining in the sunlight
I cannot seem to bring myself to start
I just can’t seem to bring myself to start
Repeat chorus
I’d like to sing a song of breath and air
So wonderful, that it could touch your soul
But when I listen to the robin
As he’s heralding the springtime
I cannot take the first step towards my goal
I just can’t take the first step towards my goal
Chorus:
But I can try to live a life
That makes an honest story
With challenges adventures
With truth and with love
And that would be a thing of beauty
A single thing of beauty
A human thing of beauty
And that would be enough
It is my hope, my desire and my effort that those who know me recognize this as my goal. And when I am done, if this one goal I have met, then I have done all right by myself and the world, done well with the Universe and, if there is a creator, well by that being, I am sure.
As far as Whitman sounding like a Buddhist, the American Transcendentalists were the first to bring Buddhism to the new continent. Thoreau made a study of it. If Whitman had been older, had been able to pal around with Emerson and Thoreau, had been, perhaps, better formally educated, there would be no doubt of him as a Transcendentalist. Instead it is debated: was he or was he not? I thought it always rather clear he was.
Of course Whitman was a Transcendentalist. Anyone who thinks otherwise can’t see the forest for the trees.