Walt Whitman
Essays

This paper offers a summary of biographical information about the American Romantic author Edgar Allan Poe, a general overview of Poe's writing style, and concludes with a close analysis of "The Tell Tale Heart." The paper argues that Poe liberated 19th century American fiction from the responsibility of having to tell a moral and that Poe focused on style over 'message.'

In any situation of social or indeed personal upheaval, artists and writers play a central role in shaping the collective consciousness of their environment. Langston Hughes and Adrienne Rich are no exceptions.

Walt Whitman's poem I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer is a famous protest against scientific knowledge and the disenchantment it can produce in the human soul. According to Whitman, exact sciences can provide only…

Walt Whitman was born to a working class family in New York in 1819. Known as one of America's greatest and most innovative poets, Whitman was also among the first generation to grow up in a completely independent…

The contrast between T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Martin Rowson's comic version of "The Waste Land" is like the contrasting sources of light and power from the sun and the moon.

One of the pervasive themes throughout all of Walt Whitman's poetry is the idea that the individual and the external world are essentially fluid; they mix together and interact in ways that we do not generally believe…

Following the American Civil War, the poetry of the United States showed signs of becoming much more distinctly American, in style, theme, and content, as the new nation slowly found its own identity, confidence, and…

Comparison: "Who Am I?" And "Gender Gap in Cyberspace"

This document contains an examination of and reflection on the understanding of death and dying and of the human body during the Civil War in the United States, which was complicated by the general prudery of the Victorian Era. Several primary documents from the Civil War period are examined and addressed as evidence of how attitudes shifted.

This paper analyzes two American poems from the early part of the twentieth century: Amy Lowell's "Madonna of the Evening Flowers" and T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The emphasis is on the different handling of the traditional genre of love poetry. Lowell is understood as using religious imagery to approach the love poem and "make it new" (in Ezra Pound's words). Eliot by contrast uses effects of comedy and satire to create a collage-effect to renovate the idea of a love-poem. Conclusion describes Lowell's use of religious imagery as being the only available means whereby to approach writing a lesbian love-poem at the time of the First World War--to that extent, Lowell's poem is described as being more "shocking" and modern (despite its comparatively placid exterior) than Eliot's poem.