Author Archive | mwcoffey

My final project was an introduction to a series of poems in which Whitman finds fault in his own collectivist philosophy. There is a fair bit written about this darker side of Whitman but there seemed to be no anthology so dedicated. These are tremendous moments in Walt’s poetry because they uphold his promise that […]

Walt Whitman is the poet of spiritual oneness, he believes in the sanctity of all life, all men, all women. However, and despite himself, Whitman rejects some men, some women. There are things which Whitman’s all-encompassing poetry refuses to entangle, there are people in whom the poet cannot find himself. Much of this contradiction is […]

Throughout his work and especially in “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman presents a unity or fellowship between all things. However, even in “Song of Myself,” Whitman often times will allude to those he will not include – “others” in this world of inclusion. These outsiders, unworthy of Whitman’s love, can be deduced in the opposites. […]

Walt Whitman cannot say goodbye, so he says, “So long!” There is some irony in his opening promise that this in a conclusion. “To conclude,” the poet says, just before going on to say that this is an open-ended discussion of the future. He then does a quick sort of summary of “Leaves of Grass,” […]

“Ode to Walt Whitman” seems to be a sort of conversation the poet is having with himself. Lorca at once has affection for the boy trying on a wedding dress and rails against the “[f]aggots of the world, murderers of doves!” Federico Garcia Lorca was born in Spain in 1898, his country was predominantly Catholic […]

In “Poem of the Proposition of Nakedness,” we see a Whitman full of irony. I read his first line as genuine but even that is difficult to do because he begs for an American response in French. “RESPONDEZ! Respondez!” complicates the poem because French may have been fashionable in Whitman’s time, so this could be […]

Whitman’s poem is so full of tangents and lists and descriptions that any form of straight narrative lasting for more than a line or two seems out of place. Whitman creates twenty-eight “young men [bathing] by the shore,” who catch the eye of a twenty-eight year old woman, all her life “so lonesome” (36). The […]

In the preface to “Leaves of Grass,” Whitman believes that America “is the race of races” (pg. 7) and that Americans “of all the nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature”  (pg. 5). This is a claim which he takes a step further by claiming that there will be […]