Walt Whitman's The Things They Carried

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.

Every day we go through, a million and one things occur. We either completely forget about it in the next instant or we carry it with us for the rest of our eternity. It’s possible to carry the memory of the generous tip the nice women gave you or the exact moment the wrong words came out of your mouth. We can carry these things called burdens, either physically or emotionally.

In the story The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien shows the reader a sense of depressing love. O’Brien uses the physical weight carried by the soldiers as a motif for the emotional burdens they must endure while fighting in Vietnam. A love of which is portrayed in the story with a soldier loving a woman more than his fellow soldiers. But this woman does not love him in the same way. O’Brien uses many literary devices throughout the story, and shall be covered in this text. The tone in the text is very prevalent, and O’Brien gives the reader easy access to find and understand them.

In works such as the novel The Things They Carried written by Tim O’Brien and the movie Full Metal Jacket directed by Stanley Kubrick, we see the hardships soldiers had to pass through during training and the Vietnam War. As it is stated in O’Brien’s book “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing – these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had a tangible weight” (O’Brien 20). After stating all of the things they actually carried O’Brien makes reference to them carrying emotional weight, to let the reader know that there was more to the war than fighting. They had other reasons to be there, such not wanting to be titled as cowards for not enlisting themselves in the war. In Full Metal Jacket the emotional weight they have on themselves is also visible throughout the whole movie. The emotional burden caused some of the soldiers such as Private Leonard Lawrence to enlist in the training although he clearly was unfit for the job. This resulted in an amazing turn of events since due to intrinsic motivation to not be the source of everyone’s laugh, he becomes someone completely different. At the end of the first part of the movie Pvt. Lawrence was no longer that unfit soldier we see at the beginning, he had changed to be a vicious person with a death wish. In both works we see the physical and emotional struggles soldiers had to undergo causing them to develop an

While general morality dictates that all living things should be protected and matter, traumatic events override this belief. Whereas the sanctity of life is thrown away, violent outbursts of rage or anger become more common. Robert Ross always resorts to his pistol when afraid or threatened – he now relies on instinct and violence rather than intellect: “He wanted his pistol… Gun. Gun. He wanted his gun.” (O’Brien 177-178) Naturally, Robert wants to get revenge against his rapists. However, murdering is not normally the first response. This shows that Robert cannot control himself completely, he thirsts for destruction. This is also a result of his post-traumatic stress injury. Likewise, his urges were evident at the start of the novel, after

In life we carry a lot of emotions, burdens and luggage. There is a quote from a great poet that reads. “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves” in “Things They Carried”. The author Tim o Brien, creates a story about a soldier and his life after the war and struggles that he has to go through and the people around him seem to go through. Tim Obrien writes this story, as a 43 years old man which is recalling his previously experiences as a foot solider in Vietnam. “On their feet they carried jungle boots-2.1 pounds- and Dave Jensen carried 3 pairs of socks” (Obrien 270). The theme revealed in “The Things They carried” is that you can keep your spirits alive by moving and carrying your

He was born in May 1819 in New York. Whitman “aimed to transcend traditional epics, eschew normal aesthetic form, and reflect the nature of the American experience and its democracy” ("Walt Whitman"). Whitman’s views on slavery are a little confusing. He initially called for the abolition of slavery but later viewed the Abolitionist Movement as a risk to democracy. In his poem Leaves of Grass he portrays African Americans as “beautiful, dignified, and intelligent” (Klammer). However in other poems, Whitman writes how he thought blacks were inferior and that he had little sympathy for them (Klammer). Whitman volunteered his time caring for wounded soldiers ("Walt Whitman"). He made 600 hospital visits and saw more than 100,000 patients ("Walt Whitman"). This encouraged him to return to poetry where he wrote about the realities of the Civil War. In the final years of Whitman’s life, he wrote that he was disappointed in the America that he saw emerge after the Civil War ("Walt

Truth, it can be a lie living inside a truth or there might be a truth inside something that does not seem true; this is how truth works, you never know what is true and what is not. This is what happens in the book called “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O'Brien. Where truth can be a lie and a lie can be the truth, it is a test for the reader to find out. So this one story in the book shows how it is true, because it embarrasses you, by the way it seems to never end, when there is uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil in the story, and when it is hard to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. These chosen characteristics shall help in proven how this war story is true. O’Brien created a true war story about the shit

Whitman wrote broad stanzas and focused on the whole of America as his inspiration. His lines covered a wide range of topics and generated multiple points of view for the reader. He called his life’s work “Leaves of Grass”; stressing the

Introduction: Walt Whitman was an American poet from West Hills, Long Island New York. He wrote plenty of poems for the New York Times Journal newspaper also known for the famous book Leaves of Grass that had nine editions and is more than one book. The book Leaves of Grass was published in 1888 when he was finally done with all nine editions and he had passed after publishing the ninth edition.

One of the most heavily impacted cultural arenas to be touched by the war was literature. Literature during the Great War often reflects upon and bitingly criticizes the horrors of war, as well as the changes society was undergoing and provides a drastic transition between pre and post war work. Many social, political, and economic shifts occurred during the war, and any of the writers of the time felt the need to speak out against the flaws they saw in their society, sometimes even while fighting for their lives in the trenches. The new style of war allowed soldiers an unprecedented amount of time to ponder the battles which they fought; not only in the literal sense, but battles of the mind and spirit which were of no shortage in the hellish

After the Civil War, Walt Whitman realized that the American people were in need of their own identity. Therefore, he wrote the book “Leaves of Grass” with the goal of creating a literature piece that was authentic and organic to the United States in every sense. Whitman introduced to literature the idea of the “American Dream” and highlighted how important it was for the American people to develop their own identity. Consequently, he rejected the European writing styles and adapted the use of free-verses to his writing, making it a popular writing style in American poetry. Whitman valued of humanity, nature and spirituality. Therefore, he joined the Transcendental literary movement and

Walt Whitman, a civil war nurse was a self-taught poet in the 1800s. Whitman is known for using lists, anaphora, free verse, and other literary devices in his poems. In his works, he focuses on American workers, diversity, transcendent approaches to nature, and individualism. “Song of Myself,” a poem written by Whitman, explores themes of nature, sex, democracy, and spirituality. Whitman uses nature to fuel his creativity in using grass as a symbol of comparison to life by using imagery, metaphors, and analogies.

In his poems and life, Walt Whitman celebrated the human spirit and the human body. He sang the praises of democracy and marveled at the technological advances of his era. His direct poetic style shocked many of his contemporaries. This style, for which Whitman is famous, is in direct relation to several major American cultural developments. The development of American dictionaries, the growth of baseball, the evolution of Native American policy, and the development of photography all played a part and became essential components of Whitman’s poetry.

Many critics states Walt Whitman as the best American poet. The publication of Leaves of grass in 1855 marked the beginning of a new poetry. The most innovative thing about Whitman’s poetry was the fact that he completely abandoned all the traditional form of writing poetry and their rules about rhyme meter and length. Instead of using traditional farm of poetry writing he uses free verse to write poetry. This is the style that most modern and contemporary poetry is written in. Whitman abandoned traditional meter patterns in favor of free verse. Free verse is the poetic verse written completely free, without rigid rules or predictable patterns. The tone and content of his poems were also very original. To most of his readers, he sounded alive,