Michael Gold’s Ode to Walt Whitman is at its most basic an explanation of how Whitman’s dreams for America have yet to come to fruition. Gold uses several stylistic elements in order to evoke Whitman within his ode. Formally, the numbered segments within the poem reference many of Whitman’s longer poems. While Gold uses shorter lines […]
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Is Whitman Funny?
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 […]
“America why are your libraries full of tears?”
“I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind…America why are your libraries full of tears?” In the aforementioned line in “America” Ginsberg provides an ironic reveal of America as it becomes characterized by chaos, in the form of violence, discrimination, and other components, which breed censorship and repression in attempts to conceal this. Like Whitman, Ginsberg employs a […]
The Moon, The Woman, The Body Electric
Whitman takes special care to describe both the female and the male form in “I Sing the Body Electric”. In section 5, he approaches the female body, describing it as a “nimbus form” that is “lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day”. I find myself also drawn to the comparison of the […]
“I Sing the Body Electric”
I really loved Emma’s discussion of the way in which Whitman plays with gender associations and qualities and agree with her assertion that his descriptions of the male and female bodies emphasizes his larger claim about the importance of the individual. This theme of the exploration of the intricacies of the individual is a resounding […]
Unifying the Body
“A woman’s body at auction, She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers, She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers. Have you ever loved the body of a woman? Have you ever loved the body of a man? Do you not see […]
“I Sing the Body Electric” and the Celebration of the Female Body
In Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric” he focuses on only discussing and celebrating the physical body, whereas before he had explored the interconnectedness of the body and soul. However, section five of this particular poem piques my interest most because it is the section of the poem that specifically celebrates women’s bodies. The […]
Transcending the Body Electric
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 […]
Grass in “Song of Myself”
The section of “Song of Myself” that stands out to me in particular is the sixth section where Whitman discusses grass. From the title of “Leaves of Grass” it is obvious that grass has some significance to Whitman. Within this section Whitman tries to grasp “What is the grass?” spawning from a child’s question. Whitman […]
Whitman’s Twenty-Ninth Swimmer
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 […]
