Shut Not Your Doors

By Whitman

SHUT 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.

An excellent poem. The only contention I have is with its conclusion. ‘Man,’ even viewed at its noblest Whitmanian conception, is finite.

I am interested most in the Infinite.