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The United States has had a history of turmoil and events of drastic changes that rupture the social fabric, and because of this, intellectual minds of varying generations must respond for the sake of the people. For Walt Whitman, his lifetime took place during the Civil War, and with that came a wave of the […]

Walt Whitman is America’s poet, a man who had a large idea of America’s then current and potential greatness. Whitman came at a time when the American people needed guidance, the Civil War, and he helped the country lick its wounds and begin bringing people back together after such a long period of division. Due […]

The United States during the 1960’s was a time of massive change for the country. The President being shot and the war overseas are just a couple of the issues being dealt with by Americans, and people were overwhelmed with the then current status of the country, and out of this came several movements; no […]

In his book 10:04, Ben Lerner takes a new approach to the novel with an extremely “metaphysical” plot where Lerner adapts a storyline from a short story in which the narrator is writing a novel about a person writing a novel. There are multiple levels of the story, where Lerner will seamlessly transition between which […]

The poetry of Walt Whitman has inspired centuries of authors since its conception in the 19th-century, but, none are so moving as the Beat poets. The Beat authors came as a result of the counterculture the United States was experiencing in the late 1950’s and almost the entirety of the 1960’s; they wrote literature for […]

In Juliana Spahr’s collection of poems, “This Connection of Everyone with Lungs” Spahr implements several Whitmanian characteristics throughout the two poems. Although she never specifically names Whitman throughout the two poems, there several moments that read like a modern adaptation of a Whitman point-of-view. Moreover, her second poem titled “Poem Written from November 30, 2002, […]

Walt Whitman is quintessential to American poetry and literature alike, so one can expect to see the massive amounts of thinkers and critic engaging with the author. Normally when Whitman is brought up in a text, he is named specifically and his views criticized directly; so it is a fresh change of pace to read […]

In the second annex of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Whitman includes two poems, “Good-Bye my Fancy” and “Good-Bye my Fancy!” titled respectively. The first “fancy” poem is really only the words “Good-bye my fancy” and then an aside contained in parentheses, and a footnote delving into the act of saying “bye” and the obsession […]

In William Scheick’s review of the article “So Long!: Walt Whitman’s Poetry of Death,” by Harold Aspiz, Scheick summarizes and characterizes Aspiz’s view of how Whitman views death. Although the article is written with the intention of reviewing Aspiz, Scheick adds much of his own insight and puts Whitman’s thoughts in a manageable light. First […]

In Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sit and Look Out,” Whitman observes the “sorrows of the world” and lists several tragedies common to the human condition. Upon reading the poem, Whitman’s words appear as compassionate, as if he really does care for the struggles of the people mentioned in the poem; “I hear secret compulsive sobs […]