Walt Whitman
Essays

¶ … American poet Walt Whitman, "One's-Self I Sing," "Song of Myself" #s 1,6,9,10,12,14,15,31,33, and 52, and "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field one Night." Specifically, it will reflect on three pieces of work and show…

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but returned home after one year. She continued to live in her family home with her younger…

Rousseau, Douglass, both prose writers; Whitman, Tennyson and Wordsworth, all three, poets. What bind them together, what is their common denominator? Nationalism, democracy, love for the common man, singing praises for…

Walt Whitman's ten-line free verse poem, "A Noiseless Patient Spider" combines metaphor and metaphysics to convey a sense of meaning and wonderment. Whitman draws parallels between the mysterious arachnid and the…

Walt Whitman's poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" are set in New York City during the early years of the industrial revolution, but are markedly different in tone, theme and the perceptions and feelings of the main characters. Melville's characters exist without joy, love or hope, and merely drag themselves through a life of drudgery and alienation, without making any human connections to each other or to nature. Mankind in Bartleby's world is simply trapped in a pointless existence that ends with death, and unlike Whitman's narrator they are unable to rise above this grim, mundane world or imagine a common link with others or with the past and the future. Rather than simply being tools and machines carrying out routine, white-collar tasks, Whitman's narrator finds the resources within himself to transform an ordinary scene of returning home from work into a sublime spiritual experience, in which he perceives a bond with all of mankind, past, present and future, as well as with nature and the entire universe in a way that Bartleby and his coworkers never could have imagined.

I think your insight that Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" is not about egotism is very apt. In fact, Whitman's poem is the very opposite of egotism. You write: "Song of Myself" seems "to focus specifically on himself,…

Walt Whitman's poems draw upon many aspects of the natural world. Whitman as a poet is obsessed with the beauty of the natural scenery and also the beauty of the body. Thus, to some extent I find the subject matter of…

Considered by many to be the father of free verse, Walt Whitman was a19th century American poet, essayist, and journalist. In his poetry, Whitman often incorporated aspects of realism -- presenting things as they are --…

Poems are often vehicles of personal reflection and expression. Poets often write poetry to communicate their personal messages to the world. Edwin Arlington Robinson, Walt Whitman William, and Wordsworth, are three…

¶ … Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson project, in their poetry, an individual identity that achieves its power from within, thus placing a premium on the individual self. Ironically, this premium on the individual self…