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 […]
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The Two Personas of Walt Whitman as Seen in “So Long!” Molly Epps
As a result of being crowned the “Great American Poet”, Walt Whitman’s poetry voice is not only familiar to Western scholars, but almost instantly recognizable for almost every American English scholar. However, what if we were to assert the claim that when we recognize Whitman’s voice in a piece of writing, we’re actually recognizing two […]
Laziness in “I Sit and Look Out”
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 […]
Whitman Among American Myth
Whitman opens the preface of Leaves of Grass with the line “America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of casts or old religions.” (5) cites remembrance as a key factor in the poetic nature of the newly formed United States and […]