“Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” There is no doubt that Walt Whitman is one of the most timeless and classic writers from American history. His large influence on the free verse form of poetry paved the way for modern poets to come. His poems reflected his transcendentalist thoughts and great love for the relatively young country America. Walt Whitman wrote with a spirit that tried to define what it meant to be American at the time. When one thinks of Whitman, the first piece to come to mind more often than not is “Song of Myself.” It is a classic piece that has been referenced and quoted in young adult literature today, such as John Green’s novel Paper Towns. This poem examines
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The speaker then faces home again and feels that the place he or she is in is the right place. Yet the poem ends with a sense of doubt: “(But where is what I started for so long ago?/And why is it yet unfound?)” These lines imply that while the speaker feels joy at being American, he or she is still unsure of what exactly it means to be that, an American. The use of parentheses puts these lines almost as an afterthought, or perhaps a sense of shame the speaker feels at doubting his or her home, at wondering if it is as right as the speaker would like to …show more content…
He is greatly speculated to be homosexual, and more recently, bisexual. To write so freely men loving men in the nineteenth century in a time when it was condemned and would be condemned for more than the next century was tremendously forward thinking. In an 1889 interview, he told the interviewer, “Sex, sex, sex: sex is the root of it all” (Walt Whitman - Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender). His poem “A Woman Waits for Me” takes that idea literally. It is about reproducing for the good of the United States of America. In the last stanza of the poem, Whitman writes, “On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and America” and “I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings.” Even though he writes freely about loving men, in this poem, he writes of his belief of the importance of passing on the greatest traits to create new and worthy Americans, to prolong the life of the United
The speaker then faces home again and feels that the place he or she is in is the right place. Yet the poem ends with a sense of doubt: “(But where is what I started for so long ago?/And why is it yet unfound?)” These lines imply that while the speaker feels joy at being American, he or she is still unsure of what exactly it means to be that, an American. The use of parentheses puts these lines almost as an afterthought, or perhaps a sense of shame the speaker feels at doubting his or her home, at wondering if it is as right as the speaker would like to …show more content…
He is greatly speculated to be homosexual, and more recently, bisexual. To write so freely men loving men in the nineteenth century in a time when it was condemned and would be condemned for more than the next century was tremendously forward thinking. In an 1889 interview, he told the interviewer, “Sex, sex, sex: sex is the root of it all” (Walt Whitman - Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender). His poem “A Woman Waits for Me” takes that idea literally. It is about reproducing for the good of the United States of America. In the last stanza of the poem, Whitman writes, “On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and America” and “I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings.” Even though he writes freely about loving men, in this poem, he writes of his belief of the importance of passing on the greatest traits to create new and worthy Americans, to prolong the life of the United