LITR 5535: American
Romanticism
Student Poetry Presentation 2005
William White Jr.
A GRACIOUS DISCUSSION
ABOUT WALT WHITMAN
From
By THE
ROADSIDE
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When
I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When
I heard the proofs, the figures, were ranged in
columns before me,
When
I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When
I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with
much applause in
the lecture-room,
How
soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till
rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In
the mystical moist night-air, and from, time to time
Look’d
up in perfect silence at the stars.
___________________________________
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 on the West Hills of
Long Island,
New York.
Whitman left school at age eleven and became an office boy
at a law firm
and in a doctor’s office. By twelve, he had learned the printer’s trade and
according to his biography “ad fallen in love with the written word.”
During 1848 and 1855
Whitman developed a style of poetry that astonished
Ralph Waldo Emerson who was a Transcendentalist ((between 1850 and
1860 there was a unique and creative concentration of writing like no other
period in American history).
POEM REVIEW: The
first stanza displays rational words and phrases
like “ranged in columns,” “charts and diagrams,” and “add, divide,
and measure.” I am not sure about second stanza – but the fourth stanza
has two transitional lines and then the genre changes to words and
phrases like “mystical moist night-air.”
Questions:
- Do
you feel that Whitman’s style of writing (in this poem) defines
mostly the Romantic or Enlightenment movement?
- In
the above poem, what words show that Whitman uses both the
Enlightenment and Romantic styles of writing to show both have a
place?
- Are
there other words or phrases that show both Enlightenment and
Romantic genres exists in the poem?
- Is the poem’s last line a reflection of a rational or romantic genre?