Whitman and Baudelaire (from class)

One's Self I Sing by Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass ONE’S-SELF I sing—a simple, separate Person;
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse. Of Physiology from top to toe I sing;   Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the muse—I say the Form complete is worthier far;   The Female equally with the male I sing.
Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful—for freest action form’d, under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing. www.bartleby.com/142/1.html Crowds by Charles Baudelaire from Paris Spleen      Not everyone is capable of taking a bath of multitude: enjoying crowds is an art. And only he who can go on a binge of vitality, at the expense of the human species, is he into whom in his cradle a fairy breathed a craving for disguises and masks, hatred of home, and a passion for traveling.      Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and fertile poet. He who does not know how to populate his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd.      The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able, at will, to be himself and an other. Like those wandering souls seeking a body, he enters, when he wants, into everyone's character. For him alone, everything is empty. And if certain places seem to exclude him, it is because he considers them not worth the bother of being visited.      The solitary and thoughtful stroller draws a unique intoxication from this universal communion. He who easily espouses crowds knows feverish delights, of which the selfish will be eternally deprived, locked up like a chest, and the lazy, confined like a mollusk. He adopts as his every profession, every joy and every misery circumstances place before him.      What people call love is awfully small, awfully restricted, and awfully weak, compared with that ineffable orgy, that holy prostitution of the soul which gives itself totally, poetry and charity, to the unexpected which appears, to the unknown which passes by.      It is sometimes right to teach the world's happy ones, if only to humiliate their stupid pride for an instant, that there are forms of happiness superior to theirs, more vast and more refined. Founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, probably know something of these mysterious intoxications. And, in the bosom of the vast family created by their genius, they must sometimes laugh at those who pity their fortunes and their lives so chaste.

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