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.