Walt Whitman

Answer any two of the six questions below. Or answer a 3rd question for 10 points extra credit!

1) Read "Song of Myself" (this was the longest poem in the book Leaves of Grass). Read it aloud or have it read to you on YouTube or LibriVox. It has a kind of musical quality. Whitman catalogs great lists of people, sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and sensory impressions related to America.

I want you to choose three lines from "Song of Myself" and tell me why you chose those lines. What do you think is special or interesting about your chosen lines? If you can't find three lines that you feel good about, then you shouldn't try to answer this question. Instead, pick one of the other options.

2) Building on the last question, there are lines in Song of Myself that are head-scratchers. In other words, we're not exactly sure what they mean.

Find two such lines that interest you but that you are not sure what exactly they're doing. Quote those lines and then give your best guess, and we'll see what the rest of the class has to say about those two lines. Alternatively, look for someone's discussion that already contains those two lines if they've answered this question, and now you try to offer an alternate explanation or reading for the meaning of those two lines.

3) In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, a teenage prince is confronted with the death of his father and then the need to avenge his father's death by killing his father's murderer! These circumstances lead Hamlet to at least consider suicide. Life is hard, Hamlet says, and we don't know if justice will ever come or if our burdens will ever be resolved, so why not end it all now? How would Walt Whitman respond to Hamlet?

Read Walt Whitman's poem "O Me O life," and try to paraphrase it into modern speech. Consider it as an answer to him Hamlet's question."O Me! O Life!" BY WALT WHITMAN
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill'd with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring-What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here-that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

4) Walt Whitman did not just write poems about the world from the safety of his writing desk. The way he lived his life was part of his poetry.

Read Walt Whitman's "The Wound Dresser" in which he recounts his experience as a volunteer nurse in the Civil War, then discuss at least two lines from the poem that interest you. Be sure to quote! Explain what you find interesting, striking, or compelling in "The Wound Dresser." What do these lines mean to you? What did they tell you about the poet?

5) If Walt Whitman were teaching this English class, based on his poetry, I like to think he would approach the teaching of literature the way that I try to approach it.

In other words, I think he would allow for many different interpretations of literature as long as we could point to where we got those ideas in the text. Find at least two examples in Leaves of Grass where you believes Walt Whitman demonstrates open-mindedness and/or openness to different possibilities and points of view. Quote those lines and then explain to the class why you found them interesting.

6) Walt Whitman uses the first person "I" in his poems as a sort of all seeing eye. He also uses the second person "you" to address his readers. Find one quotation from any work of Walt Whitman's where the voice of the narrator inhabits the point of view of another character.

In other words, I'm asking you to find a line of poetry where Whitman's narrator temporarily becomes someone else in the poem. Or, if you prefer a slightly different challenge, then find an example in one of his poems where he writes to you right now alive in the year 2017. Find a place where when Whitman write "you" he means you, dear student! Quote and explain how you are reacting to the quotation.