Walt Whitman Research Paper

As people immerse themselves into Whitman’s poetry, they are able to identify certain literary techniques and commonalities in the subject matter. Moreover, Whitman’s implementation of nontraditional ideas which many poets during his time were afraid to use gives his work even more specialty. The style by which Whitman addressed his thoughts and feelings assembled his poetry into a gem which the nation had never witnessed before. Whitman’s poetry is representative of the individual self. In most instances, this individual is Whitman himself. Furthermore, he took various subjects and incorporated them within his poems. Whitman desired to capture the America that was growing with him. As a result, his works confronted the political and social

The reason for Whitman’s dialect is not so others could benefit, but rather so it would be a model of himself. In his own words, Whitman states his poetry is “an attempt to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the 19th century, in America) freely, fully, and truly on record.” Whitman’s poetry was democratic in nature and expressing it through a common language made others able to sympathize with the poem’s characters and subjects. Whitman’s greatness as a poet contributes to the fact that others were easily able to read his poems. This leads to a distinction between self and the world in public and private situations. In this distinction, Whitman prefers spaces and certain circumstances. He then uses these preferences to allow for ambiguity and be able to enter into the heads of others (Whitman’s

O Pioneers!” which makes it a quiddity compared to his other poems. Unlike “O Captain! My Captain!”, there is an absence of a rhyme scheme. It is organized into twenty-six quatrains with the first and last lines of each stanza being the shortest. Each line ends with “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” making it reminiscent of their significance to the nation. After the Civil War, the nation was looking towards westward expansion. For this reason, the speaker characterizes the American West as the land of opportunity, therefore appealing to the pioneers’ sense of patriotic responsibility