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Walt WhitmanA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman (1860)
An early and enthusiastic expression of Whitman’s fierce advocacy of the American experience, this poem can be compared to “America,” an expression more tempered by the experience of the Civil War. The enthusiasm may be moderated but the same sort of celebration of the one-forged-by-the-many defines Whitman’s lifelong perception of the value of the American experiment.
“National Ode” by Bayard Taylor (1876)
The defining expression of the nation’s Bicentennial, in fact read during the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the poem, elegant and carefully developed, is exactly what Whitman rejected: a celebration of America through the formal strictures of rhythm and rhyme inherited from the very country from which America had declared its independence.
“America” by Allen Ginsberg (1956)
To understand Whitman’s position as American’s Poet of Democracy, a comparison to one of Whitman’s most enthusiastic Postmodern admirers can help illuminate (or perhaps deflate) Whitman’s resolute optimism. Ginsberg takes the same position of the poet as a public functionary and uses the free verse form as satire to excoriate America for its failure to live up to the ideals of its own inception, its lapse into moral complacency, and its appetite for material reward.
By Walt Whitman
A Glimpse
Walt Whitman
A Noiseless Patient Spider
Walt Whitman
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
Walt Whitman
As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days
Walt Whitman
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Walt Whitman
For You O Democracy
Walt Whitman
Hours Continuing Long
Walt Whitman
I Hear America Singing
Walt Whitman
I Sing the Body Electric
Walt Whitman
I Sit and Look Out
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
O Captain! My Captain!
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself
Walt Whitman
Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night
Walt Whitman
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
Walt Whitman
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Walt Whitman