All 11 Uses of
New World
in
Leaves of Grass
- To Foreign Lands I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World, And to define America, her athletic Democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.†
Chpt 1 *
- …intervals passing rapt and happy, Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, aware of mighty Niagara, Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute and strong-breasted bull, Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars, rain, snow, my amaze, Having studied the mocking-bird's tones and the flight of the mountain-hawk, And heard at dawn the unrivall'd one, the hermit thrush from the swamp-cedars, Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.†
Chpt 2
- After all not to create only, or found only, But to bring perhaps from afar what is already founded, To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free, To fill the gross the torpid bulk with vital religious fire, Not to repel or destroy so much as accept, fuse, rehabilitate, To obey as well as command, to follow more than to lead, These also are the lessons of our New World; While how little the New after all, how much the Old, Old World!†
Chpt 13
- …whence life and love and aught that comes from life and love, You unseen moral essence of all the vast materials of America, age upon age working in death the same as life,) You that, sometimes known, oftener unknown, really shape and mould the New World, adjusting it to Time and Space, You hidden national will lying in your abysms, conceal'd but ever alert, You past and present purposes tenaciously pursued, may-be unconscious of yourselves, Unswerv'd by all the passing errors,…†
Chpt 14
- Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared, I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal, Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand, To build a grander future.†
Chpt 14 *
- (No mere doge of Venice now wedding the Adriatic,) I see O year in you the vast terraqueous globe given and giving all, Europe to Asia, Africa join'd, and they to the New World, The lands, geographies, dancing before you, holding a festival garland, As brides and bridegrooms hand in hand.†
Chpt 26
- 3 Brain of the New World, what a task is thine, To formulate the Modern—out of the peerless grandeur of the modern, Out of thyself, comprising science, to recast poems, churches, art, (Recast, may-be discard them, end them—maybe their work is done, who knows?†
Chpt 31
- …world of the real alone, led to identity, body, by it alone, Yet in beginning only, incalculable masses of composite precious materials, By history's cycles forwarded, by every nation, language, hither sent, Ready, collected here, a freer, vast, electric world, to be constructed here, (The true New World, the world of orbic science, morals, literatures to come,) Thou wonder world yet undefined, unform'd, neither do I define thee, How can I pierce the impenetrable blank of the future?†
Chpt 31
- …Of the lessening year by year of venerableness, and of the dicta of officers, statutes, pulpits, schools, Of the rising forever taller and stronger and broader of the intuitions of men and women, and of Self-esteem and Personality; Of the true New World—of the Democracies resplendent en-masse, Of the conformity of politics, armies, navies, to them, Of the shining sun by them—of the inherent light, greater than the rest, Of the envelopment of all by them, and the effusion of all from…†
Chpt 32
- That, for the use of the New World, I sing.†
Chpt 34
- Of many debts incalculable, Haply our New World's chieftest debt is to old poems.†
Chpt 34
Definitions:
-
(New World) the Americas (North, South, and Central with nearby islands) (also known as the Western Hemisphere -- which was new to Europe in the 16th century)
- (meaning too rare to warrant focus)