Walt Whitman had first written “Song of Myself” in 1855 but finalized the name of the poem in 1892. The title itself speaks well of the general theme of the poem. Whitman spoke about the individual in different aspects of life; he spoke about knowing yourself, being in the present, and becoming an individual who regards all people and objects around him. The section that resonated with me the most was section 43. In section 43, Whitman discusses his thoughts on religions, and how he personally feels…
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Are we living a meaningless life? To be brought to such beauty of a world and then realize that we will one day perish into the night sky? Its astonishing to think about it, but if we were to travel deeper is there really a reason? In Walt Whitman’s poem Song of myself he analyses grass, and he makes a new sense of it. To Whitman, grass is not only a simple thread of green substance in the ground, it's much more. Whitman gives many ideas of what he thinks grass is but one specifies it as a whole, “It…
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1. Walt Whitman’s role as the equalizer in his poetry is to level the hierarchies of society and help to place everyone and thing on the same playing field. He uses parataxis and repetition to emphasize his democratic beliefs that no race or sex is better than the other because we are all a part of the same universe. In Song to Myself section 24, Whitman’s role as an equalizer is very clear. “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos…” (line 499). In this line, Whitman moves his description…
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“Song of Myself” is more real world or concrete while “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is more abstract or idea based. The way William Wordsworth describes the world around him comes off as more explicitly metaphorical and his poem has a sense of dreamlike wonder, while Walt Whitman’s poem level of detail gives his poem a sense of realism. Whitman definetly comes off as more self-absorbed because almost the entirety of the poem from the title to the different stanzas is about him. The very first…
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Throughout the third section of “Song of Myself,” there are three main ideas that Whitman indulges in. His examination of religion, offspring, and the human body formulate the concepts of self-love and eccentricity. To elaborate Whitman’s first claim, the reader has to delve into his words and read outside of the lines. As he states, “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,_/ But I do not talk of the beginning or the end” (934). In this first stanza of the…
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Portrayal of Nature in “Song of Myself” Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” pictures how he loves nature and everything around him, how everything relates to him in a positive way by becoming familiar with yourself physically and spiritually contemplating different possibilities making it a poem not just about himself but a poem for and about everyone’s nature. Whitman’s use of grass in section 6 of the poem describes nature of humans and their life circle. Whitman uses the imagery of grass to denote…
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In the second passage of Song of Myself, Whitman speaks of his connection with the Earth and its atmosphere. This is a very sexual passage. His breath, in and out, is combined with the odorless atmosphere that he is so addicted to. He is completely exposed to nature in the way God first created man. Nothing stands between his nakedness and nature’s nakedness. His body is at one with nature. Whitman is experiencing elements of nature, the rippling of water, but even more than that, the ripple he…
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I chose stanza 32 because I feel that it epitomizes Whitman’s belief in nature and the want to be connected fully with nature and it is a very direct passage. He begins speaking of how he would like to be an animal because they are simple and unlike humans in many ways. Whitman speaks of the ways that man is disgraceful and too complicated. He wants to live in the simplicity that animals live in and doesn’t want to deal with the strings attached to being human. For example, he writes “They do not…
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Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are regarded as one of American’s most significant nineteenth century poets. For their poems don’t take on the traditional roles of a prophet, redeemer, nor a teacher of the American world, as pervious writers did. Instead, Dickinson’s poems consisted mostly of short stanzas with short lines that would usually rhyme on the second and forth lines. In order to free it from the conventional restraints, by expressing it as a type of persona, known as first person. Whereas…
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The Sexual Ambiguity of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” Since Walt Whitman’s poems first began their rise to fame, speculations have been made concerning the sexual innuendoes and homosexual elements often displayed in his works. Many critics argue that Whitman was bisexual, others argue that he was gay, some even argue that he was simply a feminine heterosexual man. Song of Myself gives the impression that Whitman was bisexual by allowing the audience to experience Whitman’s discoveries as he was faced…
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