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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.
Walt Whitman’s fellow writer Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “People only see what they are prepared to see.” People have a tendency to try and make the outside word fit the ideals they have formed in their own minds. They want to make the outward narrative, what is “real,” conform to their “ideal.” The speaker acknowledges this tendency of the stranger to see only what they want to see and warns, “I am surely far different from what you suppose” (Line 2). The supposition of the addressee is that the speaker fits their “ideal” (Line 3). What the addressee wants to see in the speaker is “friendship” and love replete with “unalloy’d satisfaction” (Line 5). Where the stranger hopes to see someone who is “trusty and faithful” (Line 6) with a “smooth and tolerant manner” (Line 7), the speaker implies that they are quite the opposite. The image of a “real heroic man” the stranger wants to find in the speaker is unfounded. It is “all maya, illusion” (Line 9). What the “dreamer” hopes to see and find was never really there in the first place. The stranger was merely projecting their idealizations onto the person standing before them.
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A Noiseless Patient Spider
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As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days
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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
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For You O Democracy
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Hours Continuing Long
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I Hear America Singing
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I Sing the Body Electric
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I Sit and Look Out
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Leaves of Grass
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O Captain! My Captain!
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Song of Myself
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When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
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When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
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