WHITMAN'S SENSIBILTY IN SONG OF MYSELF

This article shall explore Walt Whitman's Song of Myself and show how it defines a sensibility that is both indisputably American and inimitably personal. Accordingly, the second sentence of the book's brief but first-rate introductory essay that appears in the book gets right to the heart of the matter. It states:

Walt Whitman in his poetry makes himself the center of the universe. He brings to his emphatic self presentation a detailed, partly ironic, partly celebratory sense of what it means to be an American; his poetry suggests something of what life in the United States must have been like in the middle of the 19th century" (Knox et al., 1992).

Let's look at Whitman's indisputably American sensibility first. There is evidence for this everywhere. One reason for this sensibility has got to be due to the fact that Whitman, except for a one-time visit to Canada, spent his entire life (1819 -1892) in this country never leaving its shores and, in 1879, traveled extensively through the American West (Stovall, 1961). Another reason is that, politically, he is a Jeffersonian Democrat and an admirer and follower of two quintessentia

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Category: Literature - W