Hi everyone! I’m so excited to see how you all feel about this poem! As someone who had never even heard his name before this class, I am finding myself more and more intrigued by Walt Whitman. I tend to be suspicious of male writers who are prone to excessiveness (sorry, not sorry), but I have enjoyed everything from him so far. Anyways, on to the discussion!
One thing that Whitman does well is his portrayal of cosmic forces, nature, and life as giants, and then he immediately zooms in, almost like a fourth wall break to the reader. Why do you think he does this? Does it threaten to take the reader out of the headspace of the poem or, instead, insert them further into the poem? One example of this is in stanza eight (I believe) when, after a few lines about fields and hillsides and reckoning with the earth and then says “Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?” I imagine this as a gotcha moment for the reader. He does this often with his habit of listing things, often without any connections to eachother. For me, it seems like he is trying to make it easier to conceptualize the feeling or message he is conveying. He is describing these large concepts that we readers might not experience in the day-to-day, and by putting them into more common practises, like understanding a poem finally, we can kind of figure out the puzzle.
Towards the end of the poem, Whitman writes a large section about religion, starting with “My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of faiths.” He describes participating in multiple forms of worship and devotion to different gods and deities and religious texts. This sort of goes along with the discussion towards the end of class on Tuesday about the semi-Christian tone some of us heard in the last poem. However, this time it is much less covert and not exclusively Christian. Whitman is claiming all of these identities, which leads me to believe that the “me” and “I” in the poem is Whitman taking on the identity of the entire world, or at least attempting to. I would like to know how everyone else understood that specific section.
Thanks for reading! I’m so excited to talk in class about all of this.
Hi Gracie! I feel like Whitman talks directly to the reader to ensure that they understand that the message he is sending isn’t for anyone else: it is for them, or really, for us. We are the people he is talking to, and he is asking us to take the things he is telling us, internalize them, and act on them. It makes his work dynamic and full of movement rather than static and stuck sitting on a page.