Compare And Contrast Walt Snowman And Mary Oliver

1550 Words4 Pages

American Transcendentalism is common amongst many authors and poets. Authors and poets have used animals and nature to symbolize different things like life, death, and various other topics regarding the human experience. Both Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver were transcendentalists; they strongly followed the rule of self-reliance and found truth in nature. They both use animals and nature in their poems to symbolize life and death but contrast in what life and death means to them in their poems.
Walt Whitman, notorious as the “American Bard”, revolutionized American poetry and improvised the form recognized as free verse. Whitman wrote the poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” which was originally published as, ““A Child’s Reminiscence” …show more content…

Whitman chose a bird and Oliver chose the black snake. In literature, birds are used to represent freedom, something positive, or transition. “They represent the human desire to escape gravity, to reach the level of the angel. The bird is often the disembodied human soul, free of its physical constrictions” (Birds). Whitman uses the bird to represent the transition of the death of the self to the birth of a poet. The boy is free to be a poet, which is what his soul was always destined to be. In literature, snakes are used to represent fertility, a creative life force, rebirth, transformation, immortality, healing, temptation, chaos or something negative. In literature, the color black is used to represent evil, fear, death, or something negative. Oliver used the black snake because most people are scared of snakes; most people wouldn’t care to stop their car to pick up a snake on the road and bring it to safety like they would with deer, cats, or dogs. Oliver wanted the reader to realize that a person should always treat anything and everything with care, love, and compassion no matter what or who it is and no matter how good or bad it is thought to be. Oliver wanted people to realize that all life is sacred. The second difference between Whitman and Oliver’s poems is how the characters came to an epiphany surrounding death. In Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, the boy doesn’t initially have an epiphany surrounding death after the bird disappears and never returns; he finally gets an epiphany when the sea whispers something to him, “Delaying not, hurrying not, Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak, Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death” (Whitman 76). In The Black Snake, the narrator has an epiphany surrounding death the moment the snake dies and they drive away; they didn’t need to have something else show or

Show More
Related

  • Analyzing Mary Oliver's Poem 'The Black Snake'

    874 Words  | 2 Pages

    Mary Oliver was a famous poet and nature-lover, she used nature as center of her poetries. She was observant and thoughtful, which endowed her poetry a unique charm and depth. In her poem “The Black Snake” also manifests everything in the natural world is equal. This poem narrated that the speaker found a black snake was killed by a truck and thus to start thinking death and life. Meanwhile, Mary’s poetic language also has strong power. This poetry is a simplicity and short but she used many elements of poetry to make this poetry more profound and meaningful, and the symbolism and figures of speech are the two main element in “The Black Snake”. Figures of speech brings value

    Read More

  • Nature Emerson Rhetorical Analysis

    529 Words  | 2 Pages

    The essay "Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson implements the use of many transcendentalist ideas through the use of strong rhetorical language. The core belief of transcendentalism is self-reliance and independence, and it stresses the importance that people need to do things on their own. Emerson uses irony to point out many latent truths about the concept. He also uses personification to show that the world around someone can have qualities of a human. Metaphors are also used heavily in the essay as catalysts to help the reader better understand Transcendentalism.

    Read More

  • Frances E. W. Harper and James Whitfield

    1482 Words  | 3 Pages

    American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010. Print.

    Read More

  • A Comparison of Whitman’s Song of Myself with Ginsberg’s Howl

    1225 Words  | 3 Pages

    American poetry, unlike other nations’ poetry, is still in the nascent stage because of the absence of a history in comparison to other nations’ poetry humming with matured voices. Nevertheless, in the past century, American poetry has received the recognition it deserves from the creative poetic compositions of Walt Whitman, who has been called “the father of American poetry.” His dynamic style and uncommon content is well exhibited in his famous poem “Song of Myself,” giving a direction to the American writers of posterity. In addition, his distinct use of the line and breath has had a huge impression on the compositions of a number of poets, especially on the works of the present-day poet Allen Ginsberg, whose debatable poem “Howl” reverberates with the traits of Whitman’s poetry. Nevertheless, while the form and content of “Howl” may have been impressed by “Song of Myself,” Ginsberg’s poem expresses a change from Whitman’s use of the line, his first-person recital, and his vision of America. As Whitman’s seamless lines are open-ended, speaking the voice of a universal speaker presenting a positive outlook of America, Ginsberg’s poem, on the contrary, uses long lines that end inward to present the uneasiness and madness that feature the vision of America that Ginsberg exhibits through the voice of a prophetic speaker.

    Read More

  • Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps

    995 Words  | 2 Pages

    Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island. His early years included much contact with words and writing; he worked as an office boy as a pre-teen, then later as a printer, journalist, and, briefly, a teacher, returning eventually to his first love and life’s work—writing. Despite the lack of extensive formal education, Whitman experienced literature, "reading voraciously from the literary classics and the Bible, and was deeply influenced by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, and Sir Walter Scott" (Introduction vii).

    Read More

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, And Emerson's Impact Of Nature

    934 Words  | 2 Pages

    Not many individuals see what nature is able to do because they do not take the time to understand nature. People who are able to understand nature and understand life relationships are called transcendentalists. Some famous transcendentalists are Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. These transcendentalists transformed their ideas into poems that were not like any regular poems. Nature has a big effect on individuals because it reveals the truth, lets individuals see who they really are, and helps with an individual’s personal life.

    Read More

  • The Great Gatsby

    726 Words  | 2 Pages

    Walt Whitman was an American poet, born in 1819. Whitman published a collection of poetry in which he outlined his democratic vision for America. Walt Whitman was credited with being the founder of a literature that was uniquely American. America was a very new country at this time, the Declaration of Independence, in which America claimed independence from England was signed in 1776 and was still quite recent. In 1781 America had proclaimed themselves as the First New Nation. They then began to create a culture that was uniquely American to give Americans a sense of nationalism. America had been influenced by English literature and now there was a search for a uniquely American literature. Walt Whitman took it upon himself to help to promote American identity. Whitman was very liberal as he was pro-homosexuality and an early supporter of women's equality. Whitman was also a passionate believer of an American Ideology that believed in American's exceptionalism. Whitman used his poetry to spread his democratic vision for America; there are many good examples of the theme of democracy in Whitman's poetry.

    Read More

  • Walt Whitman Essay

    712 Words  | 2 Pages

    Walt Whitman’s hard childhood influenced his work greatly, he was an uneducated man but he managed to become one of the most known poets. Whitman changed poetry through his work and is now often called the father of free verse. Especially through Leaves of Grass he expressed his feelings and sexuality to world and was proud of it. He had a different view at life, his hard childhood, and his sexuality that almost no one understood made him introduce a new universal theme to the world. Almost all critics agree that Walt Whitman was one of the most influential and innovative poet. Karl Shapiro says it best, “The movement of his verses is the sweeping movement of great currents of living people with general government and state”.

    Read More

  • Walt Whitman’s Children of Adam

    1088 Words  | 3 Pages

    Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819 on Long Island. As a child he loved to read Sir Walter Scott (Baym 2076). As an adult he took a major interest in the Democratic party, and "began a political career by speaking at Democratic rallies" (2077). However, he is not remembered for his political action; Americans remember Whitman for his amazing poetry. He was one of the first American poets to write his poetry "without rhyme, in rolling, rhapsodic, metrical, or semi-metrical prose-verse of very irregular lengths" (Rossetti), as one of his contemporary critics noted. This new style was not the only way Whitman broke from the way the traditional poets wrote. As Rossetti described, "He not unfrequently alludes to gross things and in gross words—the clearest, the bluntest, and nearly the least civilly repeatable words which can come uppermost to the lips." Whitman’s refusal to shy away from taboo subjects disgusted and offended many of the people of his day, but Whitman possessed "determination not to yield to censorship or to apologize for his earlier poems" (Baym 2079).

    Read More

  • Explication of Mary Oliver’s “The Black Snake”

    1158 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Mary Oliver’s poem “The Black Snake,” the narrator contemplates the cycle of life with the unpredictability of death. Mary Oliver’s work is “known for its natural themes and a continual affirmation of nature as a place of mystery and spirituality that holds the power to teach humans how to value one’s life and one’s place” (Riley). In the poem, The Black Snake, the narrator witnesses a black snake hit by a truck and killed on a road one morning. Feeling sympathy for the snake, the narrator stops, and removes the dead snake from the road. Noting the snake’s beauty, the narrator carries it from the road to some nearby bushes. Continuing to drive, the narrator reflects on how the abruptness of death ultimately revealed how the snake lived his life.

    Read More

  • Transcendentalism in the Poems of Whitman

    2115 Words  | 5 Pages

    From looking at the titles of Walt Whitman's vast collection of poetry in Leaves of Grass one would be able to surmise that the great American poet wrote about many subjects -- expressing his ideas and thoughts about everything from religion to Abraham Lincoln. Quite the opposite is true, Walt Whitman wrote only about a single subject which was so powerful in the mind of the poet that it consumed him to the point that whatever he wrote echoed of that subject. The beliefs and tenets of transcendentalism were the subjects that caused Whitman to write and carried through not only in the wording and imagery of his poems, but also in the revolutionary way that he chose to write his poetry. The basic assumptions and premises of transcendentalism can be seen in all of Whitman's poems, and are evident in two short poetic masterpieces: "A Noiseless Patient Spider" and "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer."

    Read More

  • Romanticism In William Wordsworth

    1407 Words  | 3 Pages

    One of the most popular American poets is Walt Whitman. Whitman’s poetry has become a rallying cry for Americans, asking for individuality, self-approval, and even equality. While this poetry seems to be truly groundbreaking, which it objectively was, Whitman was influenced by the writings of others. While Whitman may not have believed in this connection to previous authors, critics have linked him to Emerson, Poe, and even Carlyle. However, many critics have ignored the connection between Walt Whitman and the English writer William Wordsworth.

    Read More

  • The Philosophy of Transcendentalism

    1282 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Transcendentalists were influenced by romanticism, particularly in the areas of self-examination, individualism, and the beauties of nature and humankind. Fixed by the Prospect of shaping the literary traditions of a new nation, the American Romantics tended to issue pronouncements about fundamentals, for example, the role of the artist in expressing, even creating, a national identity. Henry David Thoreau advocated American expression supported by Romantic-transcendentalist theories of organicism articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nathaniel Hawthorne justified an indigenous romance fiction to plumb the depths of the human heart” (Allison, 1). They believed that a direct connection between the universe and the individual soul existed. Intuition, rather than reason, was regarded as the highest human ability. “Transcendental philosophy was based on the premise that truth is innate in all of creation and that the knowledge of it is intuitive rather than rational” (Wilson, 3). Other philosophies include returning to the simpler things of life and that man should love nature and learn from it. “Hawthorne, in his purpose to reveal the truth of the human heart, placed man in nature” (Elder, 49). “It is the true, the beautiful, the spiritual essence in nature and man. This grand and beautiful idea, of which diverse nature seems to be part, is the high reality-invisible, and truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger” (Elder, 23). Ralph Waldo Emerson's tendency of thought is toward the idealist philosophy in which s...

    Read More

  • ‘America’ by Walt Whitman.

    1143 Words  | 3 Pages

    Walt Whitman is arguably America’s most influential poet in history. Born Walter Whitman in May 31st, 1819 to Walter Whitman and Louisa van Velsor, he was immediately nicknamed ‘Walt’ to distinguish him from his father. He came to life in West Hills on the famous Long Island, the second of nine children that grew up in Brooklyn. He came to be fondly known as ‘the Bard of Democracy’, mainly because that was a main message in his work. He is also celebrated as ‘the father of the free verse’. He was a liberal thinker and was vehemently against slavery, although later on he was against the abolitionists because, according to him, they were anti-democracy. He managed to marry transcendentalism with realism in his works. His occupation was a printer school teacher and editor.

    Read More

  • Whitman's Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking

    1488 Words  | 3 Pages

    Perhaps the most complicated symbol within the poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" is that of the moon. Each time the moon appears, it appears in a way that is a striking reflection of the love of the bird.The most obvious object Whitman uses to communicate about love is the birds, the "feathered guests from Alabama". While the bird symbols in Lilacs and Cradle may seem very similar, the bird in Lilacs is a symbol of a transcendentalist view of death in the scheme of nature, and the bird in Cradle is a symbol of a much different view of death—the personal, acute pain of a lover left to mourn. Although the birds love is significant, the boy is also an important theme and the relationship between the two may be key to understanding Whitman's intention. Another object of love is the boy in the poem, which the author's voice allows us to assume is Whitman himself.Another major factor affecting the communication of Whitman's ideas on death is the diction and tone of each poem. In Cradle, death is personal, grieving is acutely painful, and death is presented as an inevitable force oppressing ...

    Read More

More about Compare And Contrast Walt Snowman And Mary Oliver

Open Document