This is my February 10th work.

(The title is a joke… obviously.)

I can not, for the life of me, figure out if I like Walt Whitman. I think I have created some image in my head of an egotistical man who thinks he knows everything (imagine Stephan Dedalus). Then I read his poems and actually feel like they are personable and introspective, and then I get confused.

From Pent-Up Aching Rivers is one of the poems that really intrigues me when it comes to Walt. In my caricature of him, Walt is a 1800s f-boy, for lack of a better term. This poem praises not only sex for pleasure but also, in the beginning, sex for procreation. When describing love, he uses imagery of waves, rain, birds, smells of nature, etc. He uses the words flesh and divine in the same line, his view of sex bouncing back and forth between something extremely human and real and something otherworldly. We have seen this literary tactic used multiple times within his writing, where he will jump from the grandiose to the everyday. I am also fascinated by his beautiful descriptions of women and their love as a gay man. It makes me appreciate his talent for writing from the viewpoint of all different people.

This was a very scattered brain, but I really loved this poem and the delicacy and realism he used while writing about sex, and slowly but surely I fear I’m beginning to love Whitman.

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.