Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass

Lowry quotes from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in Chapter 3 of Ultramarine during a long internal dialogue by Dana Hilliot as he muses after his drunken drift through the red light district of Dairen; "All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it, They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, The insignificant is as big to me as any."


Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death which has echoes of Lowry's own The Voyage That Never Ends.