Carpe Diem Walt Whitman Essay

Walt Whitman listened to the warriors’ battle stories and used them as inspiration for some of his poems. Through his volunteer work, Whitman saw firsthand the debilitating effect the war had on the soldiers’ mental health and their physical injuries, all of which were difficult to treat due to the insufficient amount of supplies and knowledgeable people present to help. All of his work with those who served during the Civil War served as inspiration for Walt Whitman’s collection of wartime poems known as the Drum-Taps. Whitman’s rise to fame is accredited to his poem “O’ Captain, My Captain!” which was published shortly following the assassination of United States president, Abraham Lincoln. However, this traditional poem varied from the majority of his work that was lined passionately with words representing connections between a body and its soul. From the collection of Drum-Taps, the poem “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Grim” describes Whitman arriving at the hospital where he sees the three unattended dead bodies. In each individual stanza, he describes each of the victims.

In one of the sections from the poem, “Song of Myself” Walt Whitman starts out with a child asking a question, “What is the grass?” Grass is a symbol of life. God, who created both the heavens and the earth also gave birth to life. When Whitman refers to grass as a “handkerchief of the Lord” (7), as a gift. When people look at the grass, they do not think of it as a creation but rather just a plant. Whitman refers to the grass as “a child, the produced babe of vegetation” (11, 12). Here, the grass is a metaphor for the birth of a child. In often cases, the birth of anything is celebrated because it symbolizes a new life, a new beginning.

May 31, 1819 was the day that poet Walt Whitman was born. He was born to a housebuilder named Walter Whitman. He started working with printing when he was 12 years. After a devastating fire destroyed that industry, then 17 year old Walt Whitman went to work as teacher in a schoolhouse for five years. He then went to work in the journalism industry. He founded a newspaper called the Long-Islander. He then worked with other newspapers, like the Daily Eagle and the Crescent. He then realized the horrors of slavery during his time in New Orleans with the creation of the Brooklyn Freeman, using his unique sense of poetry. He wrote the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which contained 12 poems. He then created a second book right before the Civil

“O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman and “Cool Tombs” by Carl Sandburg depict the death of President Lincoln, which reflects the willingness of Civil-War era Americans to sacrifice the safety of their president and the lives of soldiers for the greater socioeconomic purpose. In “O Captain! My Captain!” Whitman employs a metaphor of President Lincoln as a captain of a ship to illustrate the price of modernization, characterizing the Northerner’s struggle for unity to supply the growing nation’s needs. Similarly, Sandburg employs an impartial tone in “Cool Tombs” to convey the insignificance of the individual person, suggesting that no one is spared when it comes to satisfying

by Walt Whitman was a poem that I was entertained by. Whitman composed this poem shortly after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. With Abraham Lincoln is my favorite president, my opinion towards this poem was already biased to my adoration to the subject of the poem. Whitman did a phenomenal job creating this poem with his grief and respect for his president as his inspiration. “But I with mournful tread, walk the deck my Captain lies, fallen cold and dead.”

The primary focus for Song of Myself, contrary to popular belief, is not so much as solidified through some self-absorbed, or narcissistic ideal. Whitman’s focus is actually established within the dual-consciousness of man as the center of his own universe, sure, but strictly from the perspectives to come by legitimately broader outreach, from what’s seen extending beyond ourselves. Therefore, if we end up central to everything else, it’s by his deliberate move of framing us as some kind of arbitrator of things on alternating ends of a spectrum, or an opposing side of a coin, that our horizons are loosened to dichotomies, or wholesale contradictions formerly unrecognized. The ability to see things as more than they appear, though grounded

In the poem “Song of Myself” from the collection Leaves of Grass by the poet Walt Whitman, his interpretation of “the grass” is that it’s a child of nature and vegetation. Whitman insists that it’s a piece of the universe and is a part of nature, which we all share. This is important because it presents the grass as a vegetation of a universal thing. This affects the whole question because it proposes an idea or even truth of “the grass”. Furthermore the poet argues “I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic.../ sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones”. In other words, it explains “the grass as a forever growing thing in nature. In sum, this places the whole idea in a place of the universe. Over all this tells the age

“Song of Myself” was first published as the untitled opening poem of Leaves of Grass in 1855. The author’s name does not appear on the first edition’s title page, but it is mentioned in the poem: “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.” This characterization sums up the subject of identity in “Song of Myself.” Whitman presents himself as an American working man and as a mystical figure at one with the universe. Whitman celebrates the human body and its ability to become one with the self and with nature.The speaker shows that the union of the self and the body allows for a truly transcendent experience in which one attains absolute fulfillment. This joined self is capable of simultaneously being one with nature and standing apart from nature.

“O Captain! My Captain!” is one of the most popular poems ever written by Walt Whitman. Upon the initial reading of this poem, one may perceive the poem to be about a loyal captain who leads his crew on a treacherous, but successful, voyage which ends in devastation. If interpreted literally this is the poem’s only meaning, but for those who look further there is an underlying story behind the words of Whitman. Whitman uses multiple literary elements throughout this poem in order to unmask the story of Abraham Lincoln’s journey and ultimate death as a result of the Civil War and his fight to end slavery.

In his first anthology of poems entitled “Song of Myself”, Walt Whitman reveals some of his views on democracy through the use of symbolism and free verse poetry. His use of symbolism and free verse poetry creates indeterminacy, giving the reader hints rather than answers about the nature of the poem. In the sixth part of “Song of Myself”, a child asks the narrator of the poem, “What is the grass?” (Whitman). Instead of simply giving an answer, the narrator cannot make up his mind, and stumbles on how to explain the grass to the child. Through the use of specific symbolisms, Whitman, as the narrator, explicates his views while remaining under the façade of explaining grass to the child. The views Whitman conveys remain indeterminate and

Title- The song of myself sounds like a poem of self expression, and a gospel of Walt Whitman's’ self beliefs. When his optimistic outlook on life is brought into perspective, one could also conclude that the poem was about his positive and radical outlook on life, because it is a song of himself, his personal expression.

Abraham Lincoln was the United States’ 16th president and many people believe he is one of the most inspirational American figures in history. One man who was specifically affected by this was Walt Whitman. In the poem “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman, Whitman shares the meaning of how people were affected by this tragedy. The American People were overjoyed because the Civil War had finally ended, but then saddened by the immediate loss of their country’s president. This is shown throughout the poem with structural evidence and meaning.

President Abraham Lincoln, admired by Walt Whitman, blossomed in “Whitman's writing and in American mythology”(Eiselein) for his leadership and nobility. Whitman hoped for a rugged, healthy, who knew what real, physical work was, to be the “[r]edeemer [p]resident of [t]hese [s]tates”(Whitman). His hopes came true “as in a dream”(Whitman) when “four years later, just such a beard-faced boatman”(Goodheart) entered the White House. Walt Whitman discovered the “comprehensive, all-directing soul he had long been seeking”(Reynolds) in Abraham Lincoln’s life. Therefore Whitman, a patriotic American, would see Lincoln’s death as not only a grave tragedy but also a “promise [of] ultimate purgation and unification for America.”(Reynolds).

On April 15, 1865, millions of Americans were in mourning, as one of the greatest presidents in all of American history had died. Over one hundred years after Lincoln’s death a woman named Elizabeth Kubler-Ross made one of the greatest observations in psychology history. In 1969, her book called On Death and Dying, she coined the 5 stages of grieving as we know them today. One last character completes the scene, that is Walter Whitman, a poet, who wrote the poem “O Captain! My Captain” a hundred years before she coined the stages of grief. However, the number of years between these two events does not seem to make a difference considering Whitman’s poem, and his metaphors perfectly represent Kubler-Ross’s theory. This means that he was truly grieving, along with the rest of America, but it also makes, this metaphor an important part of psychology and history. Walt Whitman uses the metaphor of a sailor mourning the his dead sea captain to compare it to Whitman’s grief for the death of Abraham Lincoln is used in the poem, “Oh Captain! My Captain,” and it perfectly captures the essences of Kubler-Ross’s grief theory.

In Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, the poet showcases his feelings of people and himself by using literary descriptors to convey his thoughts on these and various other subjects. In section 20, Whitman’s purpose is to showcase self-assuredness regardless of what the world tries to state otherwise by maintaining his resolute happiness in being himself. This is what sets him apart from being like the other people in the world.