Re-examine All You Have Been Told — Whitman T-Shirt

A thirty-six-year-old former printer with no literary reputation set most of the type himself, put no author name on the title page, and opened the book with eleven pages telling the reader how to live. That was July 1855.

Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass, first edition, 1855

"…re-examine all you have been told…"

Context

It arrives inside a long run of commands — love the earth, despise riches, argue not concerning God, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown. Then this one, aimed at every institution that ever handed you an answer: school, church, and any book, his own included.

The sentence finishes: dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem. That's the payoff for doing the work.

Who It's For

• You've gone back and questioned something you were certain of and found it didn't hold
• You read the source before you quote it
• If you've ever changed your mind in public and been glad you did, this is your shirt

The Design

The line doesn't hold its place. It starts where you expect and then steps sideways, so the words never sit square on the chest — a sentence about not accepting what you were handed, set so it won't settle.

That deliberate imbalance is fukinsei, the Japanese idea that something left uneven holds attention longer than something squared up. The dots at both ends are doing honest work: Whitman's sentence runs on in both directions, and the shirt says so rather than pretending the fragment is the whole.

About This Tee

• Lightweight 4.2 oz/yd² combed and ring-spun cotton
• Unisex relaxed fit
• Vintage black
• Machine wash cold, inside out; tumble dry low
• Quoteiac logo on the left sleeve

Size Chart (Bella+Canvas)

Walt Whitman, in Plain English

• Born in West Hills, New York, 1819; died in Camden, New Jersey, 1892
• Left school at eleven and learned the printing trade — he set type, chose paper, and argued with binders for the rest of his life
• Self-published the first Leaves of Grass in 1855: a preface and twelve untitled poems, his name nowhere on the title page. He rebuilt the book five more times over the next twenty-six years
• Sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote back calling it extraordinary. Whitman printed the compliment on the spine of the second edition without asking
• Worked as a schoolteacher, a newspaper editor and a government clerk — the poems came out of the day job, not instead of it

More from this collection

Re-examine All You Have Been Told — Whitman Phone Case — the same instruction, carried. See the full Walt Whitman collection.

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