Human nature is quite perplexing. It has the surprising tendency to baffle you .Apart from the obvious dimensions that continue to shade the human behavior, this bafflement emanates from the inability of human beings to gauge the true profundity and worth of a particular thing or a situation in the absence of a palpable evidence. Call it a genetic malfunction or a psychological concern, till the time we do not see anything from our very own eyes, get to hear of it from reliable sources, or get to read of it in eminent literary works ,we fail to acknowledge the very occurrence of that episode, let alone endeavoring to understand it. This is how the dynamics of human attitudes and behavior has been since the very genesis of this world.
Quite
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That is the very reason he also stressed on the idea of political liberty in his poetry, which he deemed to be indispensable. Keeping this fact in mind, many critics contend that Whitman’s , A Child Said What Is Grass?” is basically an eulogy for all those individuals who died in the American Civil War ( 1864) , since this poem came to be composed around the same time …show more content…
The rather unconventional and unconfined structure of his poems, which do not follow set patterns or rhyme schemes highlights his notion of breaking free from conformity, from what everyone else is practicing .This is done basically to allude to the idea of individuality and non-conformity in personal spheres of influence of individuals since monotony not only tends to enervate you but also robs you of your creative
First of alll, the poem is divided into nine stanzas, where each one has four lines. In addition to that, one can spot a few enjambements for instance (l.9-10). This stylistic device has the function to support the flow of the poem. Furthermore, it is crucial to take a look at the choice of words, when analysing the language.
Walt Whitman is one of America’s most popular and most influential poets. The first edition of Whitman’s well-known Leaves of Grass first appeared in July of the poet’s thirty-sixth year. A subsequent edition of Leaves of Grass (of which there were many) incorporated a collection of Whitman’s poems that had been offered readers in 1865. The sequence added for the 1867 edition was Drum-Taps, which poetically recounts the author’s experiences of the American Civil War.
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.
Walt Whitman is an American poet, journalist, and essayist whose Versace collection Leaves of Grass is a landmark in the history of American literature.
A technique Whitman used in his poetry was to write in free verse, making his poetry unrestricted and easy to read. Whitman's unique way of writing poetry that was easy to read made it inclusive, this fits in with his themes of democracy as a democracy includes everyone. In conclusion, “Leaves of Grass” embodied the spirit of democracy that Whitman was so fond of. The theme of democracy is evident in Walt Whitman's poetry. Walt Whitman had liberal values for his time as he was a supporter of rights for women and homosexuals. Whitman wanted an equal democratic America which was what the Founding Fathers of America had set out to create.
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”.
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).
In stanza six of the poem "Song of Myself", by Walt Whitman, he poses the question "What is the grass?" I believe that grass is a metaphor for the cycle of life. Throughout the poem Whitman points out images that grass could represent. All of these images stem from the life and death that we come to expect in our lifetime. During your life you will experience death, it at times surrounds you, but if you look past the grief and look to the beauty you will see that it is a cycle that keeps our world in balance. The images of flags, tears, children and older people that are torn from the ones they love, but only to soon return to other lost ones are all parts of Walt Whitman's poem.
The ironic use of rhyme and meter, or the lack thereof, is one of the devices Larkin uses to emphasize his need to break out of industrial society. The typical rhyme scheme is not followed, but instead an ironic rhyme scheme is used in the sonnet in the form of abab cdcd efg efg. Larkin writes this poem as a sonnet but at the same time diverges from what a typical sonnet is supposed to be. He is commenting on society’s inclination to form restrictions on those within it. By writing out of the accepted form of a sonnet, his writing becomes more natural because of a lack of constraints due to following certain rules and fitting a certain form. He breaks free and writes as he pleases and does not conform to society. Just as with the rhyme, ...
Shiny green, blades of grass silently swaying on a breezy spring day may simply appear insignificant. However, Walt Whitman would disagree. In Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” poem number six, the poet expresses his beliefs through the significant use of grass to symbolize hope, equality, and perpetual life. Whitman’s poem begins with a child asking, “What is the grass?”
The overarching theme of the poem is the detachment from others experienced through the passing of time. He centralizes the theme by a stream of consciousness which makes the speaker feel detached from others. A line that strongly supports that claim is, “Every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum,” A very depressing line. Using a word such as “fatalistic” sets the theme straightforward. Another line similar to the theme of lonesomeness is when the speaker says, “and through the spaces of the dark, Midnight shakes the memory.”
His greatest work was ‘leaves of grass’, which is a collection of poems which he first self-published at the age of 37 in the year 1855. It was a free-verse that was loosely inspired by the Bible. It was at first criticized in his country for its ‘raw sexuality’ but was widely acclaimed elsewhere in Britain by prominent writers. It was an attempt by Whitman to get through to the ordinary American people by giving them their very own ‘epic’. He went on changing and adding material to this work until his death in the year 1892 in Camden, New Jersey. The poem ‘America’ is one of the late additions to the collection, written in 1888.
His poem is a piece of expression which contains a certain interpretation of feelings and ideas which are presented by a particular diction. Throughout this poem he constantly
He crossed the boundaries of the poetry literature and gave a poetry worth of our democracy that contributed to an immense variety of people, nationalities, races. Whitman’s self-published Leaves of Grass was inspired in part by his travels through the American frontier and by his admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson (Poetry Foundation). He always believed in everyone being treated equally and bringing an end to slavery and racism. Through his poetry, Whitman tried to bring every people in America together by showing them what happiness, love, unison, and real knowledge looked. His poetry and its revolution changed the world of American literature
There, of course, reflects the conventions of the 1950s, when most poets of the English-speaking world would have an interest in low toned poetry and carefully work in traditional metrical and stanzaic forms. Auden, Emerson, Graves, Yeats, Eliot and Frost were looked to for inspiration and imitation. Many kinds of traditional forms were rediscovered and employed as sestinas, villanelles, etc. Not only this. The finicky use of metre, rhyme and stanza-form are there for better understanding of ironic modes. His style has the seeds of the traditional, the transitional and the new style. The traditional style lies in “First follow Nature”. In the transitional style, there is a clear attempt to loosen the ties of exact form; where mind inclines to some earnest business and “Bold adventures disdain / The limits of their (classical writers) little reign (Brackets mine).” And in the new style, the poet's own voice finally breaks through to descry unknown regions and