Whitman’s Love of Lincoln Walt Whitman’s poem, “O Captain! My Captain!,” tells of a young man coming back from a battle on a ship. However, the captain has, “fallen cold and dead” (8), and the young man weeps for his captain’s death. Whitman is writing about Abraham Lincoln after he died, Whitman in deep grief and mourning. He captures the funeral of the captain by alluding to Lincoln and soldiers, the grief of someone who is close, changes the tone to match the people and himself, and captures…
Poetry Explication Walt Whitman was an inspirational poet who mainly focuses on the ideas of Transcendentalism and Romanticism. These ideals show in the poem "When I heard the learn'd astronomer". This poem focuses on the importance of appreciating nature and is beneficial to those people who spend most of their time indoors. The poem "When I heard the learned astronomer" is explaining the issues that arise when people only view the world in an intellectual way. Whitman is not saying that…
Walt Whitman was born in eighteen nineteen in West Hills, New York. The second of nine kids, which would eventually fall to seven, his family suffered tremendous financial difficulties. While his father was a gifted builder and craftsman, their rural location, and their financially struggling neighbors, made it nearly impossible to maintain a steady income. Ultimately, at eleven, Whitman was forced to leave school to work in printing. Often, Whitman described his childhood as ‘miserable’ because…
Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819, in the village of West Hills, Long Island, New York, approximately 50 miles east of New York City. He was the second of eight children. Whitman’s father was of English descent, and his mother’s family, the Van Velsor, were Dutch. In early 1822, when Walt was two years old, the Whitman family moved to Brooklyn, which was still a small town. Whitman would spend most of the next 40 years of his life in Brooklyn, which grew into a thriving city during his…
connections can be both vague and ambiguous, we will discuss works by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Nathaniel Hawthorne in order to expand our understanding of relationships and connections, in addition to what they encompass. In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Melville considers that sharing heritage in addition to the social nature of humans makes us desire to be connected to one another, possibly to perserve mankind. Walt Whitman suggests that humans…
In 1831, at the age of twelve, Walt Whitman began working for his local newspaper. He soon fell in love with the written word and started writing his own poetry (“Poet Walt Whitman”). Fast forward to the turn of the 20th century, and Whitman has already made a name for himself as one of America’s most influential poets. Two of Whitman’s most esteemed works are “O Captain! My Captain!”, written in 1865 to reflect on Abraham Lincoln's death, and “O Me! O Life!”, written in 1891 to contemplate…
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…
If there is something Walt Whitman has taught us is how amazing it can be for a single person or group to have experienced the beautiful and romantic power of life. We all have experienced this beauty at least once in our lives. Even those who believe nothing good find themselves loving nature at a certain time. Romanticism is a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement in America from 1820 - 1860 which has three major key which is Intuition, Individualism, and Imagination.It was used the…
The Civil war influenced many of Walt Whitman’s works. Whitman uses themes such as admiration, suffering, death, and warfare to enhance the message behind his poems. The effective use of these themes gives depth to Whitman’s poems, allowing him to paint a picture. Whitman’s use of themes allow him to tell a deep message while seizing the reader’s attention. “O Captain! My Captain!” has two prominent themes, admiration and suffering. America admired Abraham Lincoln for his leadership during the…
that seemed interesting to research, that I could use for the assignment. The selection process was one of the most time consuming parts of the assignment. I I gathered the final four books which were “Rebel Souls”, “Walt Whitman Reconsidered”, “Walt Whitman: A Gay Life”, and “Walt Whitman”. I began to realize that this essay was not as easy as I thought it was. After I finished my first draft, I had a meeting with the writing colleague Makayla about it. I was given feedback that had to do with…