Walt Whitman's Song Of Myself

In the late 19th century, a literary and art movement focusing on the use of emotions and imagination was born out of the Enlightenment movement. Inheriting the tradition of intellectual and spiritual liberation from the Enlightenment, but yearning for revelation of supersensory truth, Romanticism focuses mostly on the optimism in life and death, embracing nature, and rebelling against social constructs. But, from the birth of romanticism came the birth of realism. Coming as a response to the romanticism movement, mostly as a form of criticism, realism focuses on life as it really is, not how it should be, and is much less optimistic than romanticism. The ending of the Civil War, made people realize the horrors and problems in real life, something that romanticism routinely ignored. These two movements are best shown

In his passages from “Song of Myself,” Whitman shows his romantic tendencies, with his writing focusing mostly on his love of nature, life, and death. An example of this is in passage six from “Song of Myself.” Whitman writes: “They are alive and well somewhere, / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, / And ceased the moment life appeared. / All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.” (Pg. 121) The first four lines of the passage reflect Whitman’s thoughts on death. He’s using the “smallest sprout shows there is really no death” line as an example of how we as humans go back into the earth and feed the soil when we die, in the same way plants do. Grass comes from the mouth of death, so what Whitman is saying is that we never truly die. The last two lines help reiterate this, telling the reader that they shouldn’t fear death because life is cyclic, which is conveyed in the lines “all goes onward and outward, nothing