Damn straight Walt!

So I have been immersed in Whitman for the past three weeks thanks to Dr. Williams. As I went over his autobiography, I found that he had some great things to say about my home state:

"In due time we reach Denver, which city I fall in love with from the first, and have that feeling confirm'd the longer I stay there."

"The confronting of Platte cañon just at dawn, after a ten miles’ ride in early darkness on the rail from Denver . . . as we travel on, and get well in the gorge, all the wonders, beauty, savage power of the scene—the wild stream of water, from sources of snows, brawling continually in sight one side—the dazzling sun, and the morning lights on the rocks such turns and grades in the track, squirming around corners, or up and down hills—far glimpses of a hundred peaks, titanic necklaces stretching north and south—the huge rightly-named Dome-rock—and as we dash along, others similar, simple, monolithic, elephantine."

"Through the canon we fly—mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near, right in front of us—every rood a new view flashing, and each flash defying description—on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild grass—but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors with the clear sky of autumn overhead. New senses, new joys."

"Talk, I say again, of going to Europe, of visiting the ruins of feudal castles, or Coliseum remains, or kings’ palaces—when you can come here . . . I think the chyle of not only poetry and painting, but oratory, and even the metaphysics and music fit for the New World, before being finally assimilated, need first and feeding visits here"

"'I have lived in or visited all the great cities on the Atlantic third of the republic . . . but, newcomer to Denver as I am, and threading its streets, breathing its air, warm'd by its sunshine, and having what there is of its human as well as aerial ozone flash'd upon me now for only three or four days, I am very much like a man feels sometimes toward certain people he meets with, and warms to, and hardly knows why. I, too, can hardly tell why, but as I enter'd the city in the slight haze of a late September afternoon, and have breath'd its air, and slept well o' nights, and have roam'd or rode leisurely . . . andd absorb'd the climatic magnetism of this curiously attractive region, there has steadily grown upon me a feeling of affection for the spot, which, sudden as it is has become so definite and strong that I must put it on record.' So much for my feeling toward the Queen city of the plains and peaks, where she sits in her delicious rare atmosphere, over 5,000 feet above sea-level, irrigated by mountain streams, one way looking east over the prairies for a thousand miles, and having the other, westwasd, in constant view by day, draped in their violet haze, mountain tops innumerable."


If you made it through all of those, congrats.