Shut Not Your Doors
Shut Not Your Doors - context Summary
Born from Civil War Nursing
Written out of Whitman’s Civil War experience as a volunteer nurse, the poem presents a book born from the battlefield rather than academic study. It asks cultural institutions not to exclude this new witness, offering a sweeping, chant-like vision that fuses life, death, nature, God, and a shared human identity. The speaker frames these wartime observations as essential, experiential truth that complements and challenges polished, bookish knowledge.
Read Complete AnalysesSHUT not your doors to me, proud libraries, For that which was lacking on all your well-fill’d shelves, yet needed most, I bring; Forth from the army, the war emerging—a book I have made, The words of my book nothing—the drift of it everything; A book separate, not link’d with the rest, nor felt by the intellect, But you, ye untold latencies, will thrill to every page; Through Space and Time fused in a chant, and the flowing, eternal Identity, To Nature, encompassing these, encompassing God—to the joyous, electric All, To the sense of Death—and accepting, exulting in Death, in its turn, the same as life, The entrance of Man I sing.
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