Author Archive | Kristen Walczak

My project oversaw the connection between the trajectory of Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman’s work. In class we specifically talked about Whitman’s influence on African American writers, so with my project I wanted to take this idea a step further and explore not only Whitman’s influence over the black poet, but how their works are […]

Known as an egalitarian, Walt Whitman’s poems are often seen as champions to social democracy, transcending the boundaries of time, space, and people to make all things equal. It is no surprise then, that the African American literary community has often embraced Whitman with open arms, as a man beyond his time who believed in […]

In Rankine’s work, Don’t Let me be Lonely, An American Lyric, one of the first things I noticed was her brief mention of race in the very first paragraph. Rankine describes how she never truly knew anyone who had died: “The years went by and people only died on television -if they weren’t black, they were […]

In This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems, by Juliana Spahr, I, along with the rest of our classmates have clearly recognized a Whitmanian influence in this work. Even the title itself adheres to Whitman’s belief that as a nation we are all somehow connected, whether biologically, spiritually, or sometimes both. I was really struck with […]

“Those first days of the residency, days that were nights, I would sit at my desk and read Specimen Days, his bizarre memoir, for hours.” Throughout 10:04, Lerner’s narrator alludes to Whitmanian ideas and even Whitman himself. By the time he travels to the residency, the narrator explains how he spent most of his time reading Whitman’s […]

In section ten of Whitman’s most celebrated poem “Song of Myself,” he describes giving aid to a runaway slave: “ANd brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet, And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes.” Originally published in 1855, Whitman […]

After reading the poems “Out of May’s Shows Selected,” “Going Somewhere,” and “Continuities,” I was surprised at the incredibly hopefully and optimistic outlook the late Whitman left for his readers. Although through our weeks in class Whitman has almost always proven to be a forward looking poet, after last weeks civil war poems describing the […]

For this week’s extending the conversation presentation, I chose a poem by Larry Rottmann entitled, “A Porter on the Trail.” Initially, when I was searching for a ‘beyond’ poem to fit the theme of war and patriotism, I expected to choose a poem celebrating Whitman’s love for America. However, when I came across Rottmann’s poem, […]

Martin Espada’s poem, “How We Could have Lived or Died this Way” really struck me as anti-Whitmanian. Although Espada seems to call upon Whitman in terms of form, his content challenges Whitman’s ideal vision of America and gives readers the harsh reality of today. In terms of form, I noticed Espada using similar catalogue stanzas, […]

For this blog post, I am going to go beyond Walt Whitman in order to examine both the meaning of the poem “I Sing the Body Electric” and Walt’s clear influence on pop culture. The TV show The Twilight Zone, as I discovered last year, has an episode with the same title as Whitman’s poem, which is […]