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The Poetry of Walt Whitman

This essay will examine Walt Whitman as an important voice in literature and a uniquely American one. In his preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman outlines a national purpose in writing that book: encapsulating and embracing the teeming multitudes and the daily large and small, good and bad events that make up the American scene:

The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations (741).

This is what makes Whitman's poetry in general and "Song of Myself" in particular both important and uniquely American. He sets out to capture the Jeffersonian ideal of democratic equality in a roving, unabashed and sometimes daring poetic mode. Through- out "Song of Myself", he uses what he calls leaves, as opposed to blades, of grass as a metaphor for life and for individuality: Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord (line 102) . . . Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic (1056). . . Growing among black folks as among white (108).

That last line is especially noteworthy. In the pre-Civil War era when blacks were treated in person and by law as less than human, Whitman regards everyone as fully human. The 13th stanza, for example, is Whitman's admiring observation of a black man driving a team of plow horses:

The negro that drives the long dray of the stone-yard, steady and tall he stands pois'd on one leg on the string-piece (226) . . . His glance is calm and commanding (228) . . . I behold the picturesque giant and love him (230).

In 1855, this section would certainly have sparked contro- versy, as would his startling description of masturbation in stanzas 28 and 29, falling near the poem's mid-point:

Flames and ether making a rush for my veins (620) ....

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The Poetry of Walt Whitman. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:55, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692692.html