LITR 4232 American
Renaissance
LITR 4232 2008 final exam
Essay Answers to Question 9: essay on an author
Alicia Atwood
Whitman: No More Modest Than Immodest
Essay Question 9, Course Objective 1
The author I loved learning about the most this semester was Walt Whitman. The most admirable thing about Walt Whitman was not his prominent, flowing white beard, although the beard was pretty incredible. The most admirable thing about him is that he was a master of free verse and rewrote the rules of American Romanticism. There is no doubt as to this man’s influence on any poetry written since he was published. “Whitman is widely celebrated as ‘America’s greatest poet’” (White). He is exquisite at translating himself. I will look at his style and subject matter, as shown below in quotes from “There Was a Child Went Forth” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”. His style and subject matter is what makes him prominent in the minds of his contemporaries and those interested in literature today. I will also compare him to Lincoln. Whitman and Lincoln have much the same lofty, but humble style, and both take whatever they write into the “larger sense” eventually.
I first fell in love with his subject matter. I am not alone in this; his subject matter is one of the reasons he is so widely read in classrooms and private collections. Leaves of Grass is the fourteenth most popular book of poetry on Amazon.com, one of the top internet sellers in the world. His poems seal in sentences events like Lincoln’s death and the Civil War, and places like Manhattan of the 1850’s. He wrote about himself, elevated and lofty but still humble, not counting himself greater than any other. He wrote about common people in common places; he reminds me a little bit of a Victorian writer in this aspect. He wrote in a style that was more like common speech, and it was meant to be so. The elegance of his style is beautiful, and he is wonderful at putting together words that spell out an idea he is trying to convey.
“There Was a Child Went Forth” does a really nice job of showing Whitman speaking of plain things in a lofty voice. Whitman describes all the things boys experience that make up his character later in his life. “And the schoolmistress that pass’d on her way to the school, / And the friendly boys that pass’d, and the quarrelsome boys, / And the tidy and fresh-cheek’d girls, and the barefoot negro boy and girl, / And all the changes of the city and country wherever he went.” In this section of the poem, the reader gets a time-capsule of what images and people affected this boy. Whitman makes the subject matter common enough for everyone, even people in our time period, to relate, but it is written in beautiful language. He broke away from all the structured, iambic pentameter, nature poems and made common poetry, but he didn’t make poetry common. What I mean by that is he took common things and made them into beautiful verse, but he did this without making his poetry base or simple. The schoolmistress, friendly and quarrelsome boys, girls, and negros were not something typically written about in poetry, but Whitman crafts them into a poetic sense that makes everyday life just as lovely as the most magnificent poetic experience. . . .
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