What Are The Similarities Between Walt Whitman's V. S. Baudelaire

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Walt Whitman’s V.S. Baudelaire’s Walt Whitman’s, “Song of Myself” and Charles Baudelaire’s “A Carcass” have many similarities and differences. Both of the poems have qualities of death in the end which reflect their early lives. Walt Whitman and Charles Baudelaire had very different childhoods in the sense that Whitman had a close family when he was growing up through adolescents. While Baudelaire had a broken family when he was a boy.2 The authors integrate self and views of the self in their texts, in addition they also have specific words and phrases that they both use. Walt Whitman’s, “Song of Myself,” focuses on himself in the sense that the body is connected with nature. Throughout the portion of “Song of Myself,” Whitman describes a part of his body as a part of nature. “My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air.”1 In this sentence Whitman describes his tongue and blood as being made from soil and air. He then goes on to say, “Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same.”1 Here Whitman is describing that everyone is connected in a way. When the two quotes are meshed together they describe that not only is everyone part of the earth but since they are a part of earth, everyone is connected by nature. In addition to this, just as nature is about life, death always …show more content…

Whitman does so by discussing death on a battle field in war and he discusses nature by describing the human body coming from the earth itself.1 Whitman also sees everyone not as individuals but as a whole connected and intertwined by the earth. He also uses the word, “I” throughout the poem. Baudelaire on the other hand sees nature in a sexual sense. He compares the carcass so that it sounds sexual in a very demeaning and disgusting way. Baudelaire does not use the word, “I,” until the end of the poem, when he describes himself as deaths