In Whitman’s piece “This Compost,” we see a different side of the famous writer. Where he often talks about the body and nature as something to celebrate – or connect with – here we see him wrestling with the idea of it. Where Whitman is normally excited about bodies and people, as in “Leaves of […]
THIS COMPOST! – A Screenplay Adaptation
This Compost EXT. WOODS – DAY The sun shines through the leaves of the trees onto the shore. Narrator (V.O.): Something startles me where I thought I was safest Subtle waves lap onto the muddy banks between the ocean and the woods. Narrator (V.O.): I withdraw from the still woods I loved, I will not […]
Moving Forward in “Reconciliation”
Whitman’s poem “Reconciliation” dwells on death and the end of something while also attempting to move forward by the end. Throughout the poem there are clashing elements in the language, Whitman clashes death with life in this brief poem. He also looks death in the face by the end; literally. My favorite thing about the […]
Optimism in ‘Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice’
Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice published in 1865 was one of the major poems in the Drum-Taps cluster of poems documenting the Civil War in America. This moment in American history was devastating and paradigm shifting, a realization and idea that Whitman delves into in many of the poems in this cluster. Many […]
Death, remembrance and grief in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is one of Walt Whitman’s most beautifully written poems. He writes this poem in remembrance of President Lincoln, discussing death, grief, and recovering from such a tragedy. The poem moves in cycles as it unfolds, beginning with an overview of death and ending with Lincoln’s coffin finishing its […]
Post-War: Elegy and Memorialization
We often mourn the loss of an other, but how does one mourn the losses on such a scale as we see in war? Whitman is perhaps the quintessential poet of crisis and recovery: his catalogues hold the world in all of its diversity together; his acts of poetic and personal sacrifice suggest that union […]
The War Itself: Drum-Taps
In “Year that Trembled Beneath Me,” Whitman asks, as the war begins to scar both the land and Whitman’s own psyche: “Must I change my triumphant songs? / Must I indeed learn to change the cold dirges of the baffled? / And sullen hymns of defeat”? The poems we read from Drum-Taps offer a range […]
Pre War: Resting By the Roadside
Critics have long puzzled over the cluster of poems–“By the Roadside”–that Whitman tucks just ahead of his Drum-Taps. This cluster comes directly after after the “Sea-Drift” cluster, which includes some of the most famous poems of crisis and recovery that Whitman would ever write, include “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” and “Out of […]
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 […]
Crossing Cistern Student- A Response to Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
Crossing Cistern Student Response to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman 1 Patterned bricks below me! I see you face to face! Live oaks above– sun there half an hour high– I see you also face to face. Classes of young men and young women dressed in the usual outfits, how curious you are […]