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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.
It seems odd to suggest that this poem is tragic, that it is sobering and cautious, restrained and uncertain—seldom adjectives applied to any Whitman poem. The poet here celebrates the recovery of his nation from the devastation and brutalities of the self-inflicted horrors of the Civil War, at the time of the writing still vivid within the national consciousness. Everywhere he turns his wide-eyed lens he chronicles the evidence of that recovery, the emergence of new inventions, the energy of ever-expanding cities, the factories that never quiet, and the hum and buzz of perpetual commerce.
Yet the Civil War has taken its toll on the poet, a grim and disquieting reality that he inserts between parentheses early on in the poem. It is his darkest moment, his acknowledgement that what the war taught him was the inevitability of war itself. As such, within parentheticals, this dark suggestion works as a kind of minor-key contrapuntal movement against the poem’s otherwise heroic optimism. Whitman, born in the ecstatic ebullience of the first-generation of Americans not born British subjects, lived to see that bold and vigorous experiment fall not to some invading empire but to itself, to its own greed and anger.
Whitman’s verse after the war reflects that he has learned the precarious nature of the kind of peace that ensures the evolution of his beloved country.
By Walt Whitman
A Glimpse
Walt Whitman
America
Walt Whitman
A Noiseless Patient Spider
Walt Whitman
Are you the new person drawn toward me?
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