Analysis OF WALT Whitman’S COME UP FROM THE Fields Father, AND O Captain, MY Captain PDF

Preview

Summary

Whitman's poems portrayed an idealised version of America, they also reflected his own personal situation at the time of writing. A significant part of his personality was shaped by his reactions to important social events of his time....

Description

ANALYSIS OF WALT WHITMAN’S COME UP FROM THE FIELDS FATHER, AND O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN While Whitman's poems portrayed an idealised version of America, they also reflected his own personal situation at the time of writing. A significant part of his personality was shaped by his reactions to important social events of his time. It was only natural that the Civil War in the United States would also impregnate him with ideas. Drum-Taps and its sequel contain poems that he wrote in response to the Civil War and are published in his collection Drum-Taps. In literature, war is typically depicted in two diametrically opposed ways. On the one hand, there are poets who glorify war and write poems that encourage people to fight in it, and on the other hand, there are poets who criticise war by peeling back the romantic veil that surrounds it. Generally speaking, poets who have not had direct experience on the battlefield romanticise war, and since Whitman had not participated in the Civil War, he did consider the unrest to be a positive development because he believed it would bring about a resolution to the rift that existed between the two halves of the country. He was so moved by this thought that he wrote the recruitment poem "Beat! Beat! Drums!" as a result. It didn't take long for this ecstatic attitude toward the war to begin to change. Whitman had volunteered to help with the care of wounded soldiers, and it was there that he was confronted with the horrors of war for the first time. Furthermore, his brother George's decision to join the police force and his subsequent injury caused him to directly experience the pain and anxiety of all the families who had members serving in the line of duty. A moving account of a family's reaction to their son's injury in battle, written by Whitman using the sympathy he felt as a medical attendant to the soldiers and the anxiety he felt as a brother, Whitman creates this moving account. The poem has a dramatic feel to it, which I like. A worried little daughter of the family asks her father and mother to take a look at the letter from their dear Pete, and the storey begins with that request. Following her address to her parents, the young lady suddenly begins to describe the beautiful scenery that surrounds them in her own words. It's autumn everywhere, and it's the season of fulfilment. Nothing in nature indicates even the slightest degree of unrest, but in the midst of this is this letter, whose arrival was anticipated, but whose arrival also causes anxiety. The letter provides the parents with some startling information. They realise that it was written by someone else, which is enough to make them feel uncomfortable. Furthermore, it informs them that their beloved son has been severely injured. "At the moment, the situation is poor, but things will improve soon." There appears to be a sinister irony lurking beneath the surface of this one in particular. The daughter attempts to console the mother by referring to that ambiguous line, but the mother knew in her heart of hearts that she had lost her daughter. Whitman draws on his previous experience as a soldier's attendant in this poem. They were frequently unable to write letters as a result of fatal injuries, and in many cases, the soldier died before the letter could be delivered. As a result, these letters, which included

the formal consolation that the wounded would recover soon, were hardly capable of conveying the truth about the situation. The poem concludes with a description of how the mother transforms into a melancholy individual as a result of receiving this letter. This poem's final line expresses the sentiment that after that ominous moment, the mother did not live life, but only moved forward in time to death in the hope that death would bring her son back to her. ANALYSIS OF O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN Whitman's signature style appears to be his use of informal lines throughout his work. His lines are luminous with spontaneity, but this poem seems to radiate with a completely different radiance. This song makes excellent use of rhythm and metre, and it almost has the feel of a march past song in its structure. Interestingly enough, the poem's distinctiveness appears to have stemmed from its singular purpose. This was one of four poems written by Whitman in memory of Abraham Lincoln's death, and it was published in the journal The American Poetry Review. This one, out of the four, has a technical gloss to it that is quite different from Whitman's usual writing style. Since the assassination of Lincoln occurred so suddenly, the entire nation has been terrified, and this song appears to have been written by the poet as a catharsis for the entire nation. It is not simply an elegy, but rather a one-of-a-kind combination of dramatic impulse and elegiac intensity that is unlike anything else. A ship and its voyage serve as metaphors in the poem to tell the storey of America's journey through the turbulent years of the twentieth century. The image of the sea appears to be used to depict the difficulties of the American Civil War. It is at this point in the poem that the perilous journey has been successfully completed, and the entire nation is standing on the shores, jubilant and waiting to welcome their champions. Within this happy atmosphere, fate appears to strike out of nowhere as the capable captain of the ship is discovered dead on the ship's deck, seemingly by chance. Death enters the poem with such abruptness that the narrator's delight at the welcome ovation is quickly replaced with a sense of sadness. Through the use of its three meticulously constructed stanzas, the poem depicts the entire scene. The shocking news is delivered by the first. The second contrasts the joyous atmosphere outside with the petrified state of the ship, where the great man has "fallen cold and dead" on the ocean floor. It also makes one final attempt to awaken the beloved father of the nation before the ship arrives with the body and the mourning companion, who is now faced with the heartbreaking task of breaking the shocking news to the gathered crowd. The structure of the poem appears to be similar to that of a tragic novella. It has its climax, anagnorisis, and peripatetic sequences all perfectly arranged. The tragedy is revealed in the final stanza, and one can almost feel the cathartic effect that the mourning nation must have felt as they hummed this beautiful yet tragic song written by the poet of the United States. From William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg; from Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer, to June Jordan

and Michael Harper; from Meridel LeSueur and Muriel Rukeyser, to Patricia Hampl and Sharon Olds; from D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, to Charles Tomlinson and Anthony Burgess; from Rubén Daro, Fernando Pessoa, and Federico Garca Lor Our editorial work with the Walt Whitman Archive is directly related to the publication of this monograph (www.whitmanarchive.org). As a result of this endeavour, we have come to the conclusion that a new type of Whitman introductory book is required. We are motivated not so much by a desire to reproduce in electronic form the many things brilliantly accomplished by the monumental Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (22 volumes, New York University Press, 1961-84) as by a desire to address the dated scholarship, as well as the gaps, peculiar orderings, errors, incoherencies, and other inadequacies, that characterise that edition. Perhaps the most bizarre decision made by the editors of the New York University Press was to never include a straightforward printing of the first edition of Leaves of Grass anywhere in the 22-volume set, despite the fact that it is a document of primary importance in literary history. Except for the final "deathbed" edition of Leaves (named as such because copies were brought to Whitman during his final illness), the different editions of Leaves can only be imagined from the textual notes and lists of variants in the Variorum Edition, which are included in the Variorum Edition. Another oddity is the omission of Whitman's poetry manuscripts, which seems particularly odd given that the New York University Press edition contains a substantial amount of material of minor significance that has been meticulously edited and annotated. Original plans for the three-volume Variorum Edition of Leaves of Grass called for it to include all of Whitman's manuscripts, periodical publications, and book publications; however, it ended up focusing solely on the book editions, leaving the important manuscript origins and early periodical versions virtually inaccessible. Despite plans for a second Variorum Edition, which would have dealt with materials that were not covered by the first Variorum, the project never materialised. In recent years, our electronic archive has made a growing number of Whitman's poetry manuscripts available to the public, providing insight into a previously unknown aspect of the poet's creative process. As a result, we've titled our book Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work to reflect this. As is true of every biography, every book about Whitman rewrites the script of Whitman's life and work, altering the meaning of his work and emphasising certain events in his life. In that sense, our book certainly rescripts Whitman, but our title is also meant to imply a recurring theme that will be explored further in the following pages: We are rethinking Whitman's life through the lens of his script, the thousands of manuscript pages that he left behind and which, to this day, have not been fully explored and understood. When it comes to print poetry, Walt Whitman has always been referred to as the "poet of print," the newspaperman who learned to set type and who frequently took his poetry manuscripts to print shops to have them set in type so that he could immediately see what they would look like on the printed page. As a result, Whitman has often been portrayed as a poet who begins and

ends his work in print, when in fact he spent a great deal of time working in script. Whitman's most intense struggles were in script, in that tough, originating workshop where words first met paper, from his earliest notebooks, where we can trace the first seeds of Leaves of Grass, to his final years, where he struggled against failing health to scribble out his final poems, Whitman's most intense struggles were in script, in that tough, originating workshop where words first met paper. That was the beginning of the process that led to Whitman's eventual identification with his book and eventual identification with himself....