While Whitman’s poetry often works to define the United States of America as a nation, Maria Melendez Kelson’s poem “Let America be las américas” advocates for an unraveling of its nationhood and an unwinding of time, back to when the land that is America was a borderless part of a large, diverse continent. Melendez Kelson […]
Author Archive | Rae
Native Americans vs. America: Whitman, Osceola, and the Seminole War
I grew up attending mass at Stella Maris, the small Catholic cathedral on the west end of Sullivan’s Island that is directly across the street from Fort Moultrie. Consequently, I also grew up running around the grounds of Fort Moultrie after mass let out, ducking in and out of the dank brick rooms with my […]
Women in Whitman (critical summary of Beach)
In his article “‘A Strong and Sweet Female Race’: Cultural Discourse and Gender in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,” Christopher Beach explores the complex way that women are treated in the poetry of Whitman. Though Beach does not believe that Whitman writes women in a progressive and radical way, neither does he believe that Whitman wrote […]
“Mirages” and Whitman’s American Dream
“Mirages” is one of the Whitman poems that has interested me the most thus far in our class; I am drawn to it by how different it feels from his other work, while at the same time it feels so quintessentially Whitman. Considering the outside narrator and the theme of illusion and unreality, as well […]
Som P. Sharma’s “Self, Soul, and God in ‘Passage to India'”
In his critical article “Self, Soul, and God in ‘Passage to India,’” Som P. Sharma dissects Whitman’s presentation of his relation to self in “Passage to India” as three separate and simultaneously harmonious parts–self, the soul, and God. He relates this view of self to Hindu metaphysics, a parallel that grounds his critique of the […]
Gender Inequality in “A Woman Waits for Me”
Whitman’s “A Woman Waits for Me” seems to propagate two contrasting ideas: that a woman is equal to a man and a whole person in and of herself, and that she is not complete without the acknowledgement and touch of the speaker (whom we can assume is a man). Though the speaker of the poem […]