The Unexpress’d

How dare one say it?
After the cycles, poems, singers, plays,
Vaunted Ionia’s, India’s⁠—Homer, Shakespeare⁠—the long, long times’ thick dotted roads, areas,
The shining clusters and the Milky Ways of stars⁠—Nature’s pulses reap’d,
All retrospective passions, heroes, war, love, adoration,
All ages’ plummets dropt to their utmost depths,
All human lives, throats, wishes, brains⁠—all experiences’ utterance;
After the countless songs, or long or short, all tongues, all lands,
Still something not yet told in poesy’s voice or print⁠—something lacking,
(Who knows? the best yet unexpress’d and lacking.)

Where this text comes from

First published in Good-Bye My Fancy (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891). Printed in Good-Bye My Fancy, whose title page calls it the 2d Annex to Leaves of Grass, and gathered in as the Second Annex in 1891–92, which is the arrangement the corpus text follows. First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1]

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/walt-whitman_leaves-of-grass, goodbye-my-fancy.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1–#L10.

Cite this poem

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “The Unexpress’d.” First published in Good-Bye My Fancy (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/walt-whitman/the-unexpressd/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

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