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Walt Whitman Pioneers ! O Pioneers Essay

502 Words3 Pages

After reading and rereading both versions of Walt Whitman’s poem, “Pioneers! O pioneers!”, I noticed that the 1891 version compared to the 1867 version seems a little more “laid back” so to speak. In other words, the stanzas are somewhat more constricted in the 1867 version and that makes me wonder why Walt Whitman even decided to have different versions of the poem. I mean, based on the photos of the printed versions, the pages look different overall, which might mean that the pages were smaller or bigger causing the poems to look different. However, perhaps Whitman made a great deal of revisions to his poems, which is why there would be different versions of “Pioneers! O pioneers.” In addition, the numbers that came before every stanza in the 1867 version are no longer there in the 1891 version, which I think is probably because by 1891 the form and structure of writing poems changed. …show more content…

Actually, the fact that the numbers were gone created a better flow of the poem and my eyes didn’t have to skip so much from one stanza to the next. Although, this is purely for the online version because when I look at the printed version, the poem still looks crowded, but there is less space between each stanza so it is less of a problem. Moreover, I don’t think either version looks less like a poem because of the way it is formatted online as opposed to the printed versions since that is something we touched base on in class. More importantly, the structure of the 1891 version of the poem helped me focus on the poem as a whole rather than each stanza. That is, it helped me figure out what Whitman was trying to describe in his

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