Meg Whitman

The poems “I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman and “I Too” written by Langston Hughes each express similar and different attitudes towards America. Both writers each have their own perceptions of America that they have written about in their poems.The attitude expressed in “I Hear America Singing” and “I Too” are both wanting equality along with the poem “I Too” wanting to end racism. There are some major differences perceived in both these poems on the author’s perspective on America. One…

Whitman and Hughes Comparison Essay The two poems we have studied and analyzed, Walt Whitman’s “I hear America Singing” and Langston Hughes’ “Let America be America Again”, each have very different central meanings. Both poems show the authors’ outlooks on America, Whitman’s being positive, and Hughes’ being negative. The tone and diction that each of these very successful authors choose to use in their writing come together to create the central message and the mood of the poems,…

Was Walt Whitman the first hippie? His radical ideas make him worthy of this title. Whitman rejected many of the popular ideas of his day and created on his own style, which is know as free verse writing. Whitman wrote during the transcendentalism period, transcendentalism means that there is an underlying connection between all things, such as humans, and nature. Not only did he form his own style, he also formed ideas, about, the lessons that can be taught through nature, the value of the…

“ When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” is a poem in which Walt Whitman, the author, talks about an astronomer’s lecture and how the narrator had gotten lost in the said astronomer’s lecture. The narrator explains things that he/she envisioned during the lecture and how he/she reacted mentally to the things said by the astronomer in his lecture. Like a lot of his other writings, Whitman wrote this poem in free verse. This poem consists of one stanza with eight lines. The first four lines of this…

In Self Reliance, Emerson encourages his readers to basically follow their own path, to be yourself, and that being an individual is okay. Emerson’s idea about individualism is also similar to Whitman’s because they were Transcendentalists. This prompt from Self Reliance is significant because it basically summarizes all of his thoughts as a Transcendentalist. He makes it known that we need to understand how important our thoughts are rather than being influenced by others by saying “A man…

speech and much more. Ginsberg is famous for his free speech that was controversial in the 1950s but then praised in the 1960s. When Ginsberg first started out, he was one of the first to talk about taboo subjects like sex, much like his idol, Walt Whitman. Free speech is not the only thing that Ginsberg was notable for; in fact, he was particularly active in social and political settings. For example, he was a signer for the Vietnam protests vowing to refuse tax payments, he raised awareness…

Despite, or perhaps because of, this country’s short history, the American identity is one of the most highly contested and undefinable of intangible ideas. Many of the highly debated abstract concepts are so often and sometimes needlessly argued over because they are indefinable. So much can fall under the categories of these types, like art, love, and poetry, that deems them impossible to narrow down into workable definitions. A blank canvas can be considered art and free verse is somehow…

such art that allows its creator to call upon a variety of emotions. Whether those emotions are a sense of delight, anger, contempt, sorrow, etc, all are forms of emotion and are easily seen throughout the many poems written by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Paul Lurance Dunbar. When these poets fuse their emotions with their words, we the readers are able to feel a fraction of what they might have felt at the time of the poems creation. It is this component that allows the readers to…

The Natural World The poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman is talking about him listening to an educated astronomer lecture using his proofs, figures, columns, charts, diagrams and how to add, divide, and measure them. While he was sitting in the lecture room with that astronomer teaching, the rest of the room began to applause. It seemed to be too much for him because he became unaccountably tired and sick. He felt that way until he left the room and went outside and…

historically America has had difficulty balancing these ideals. One of Walt Whitman poems preaches the possibility that these concepts can work together. “Song of Myself” is Whitman’s paean to his ideal of American democracy, an idea which balances, or attempts to balance, freedom with equality, individualism with community, a relentlessly inclusive, or as Whitman puts it, “absorptive”…