I feel pretty relaxed reading Walt Whitman’s poems, a feeling which never before did I feel when reading poems. I have admitted it and here I admit it again that poems always scare me because they are difficult to read, to understand. They seem too academically high and out of rich. In short, they are selective of readers, of which I am not one. Whitman’s poems show me another world. His poems are very absorbing and accepting of the mass.
First, the expressions are casual where sentences are said as we normally speak. There are usually not this “weird” switching between words to create rhymes so it is pretty easy to follow his thought. Personally, I do not need rhymes to read poems. They bother me a little as it rhymes too well, it slips through my head. I bet many people find it easy reading Whitman. Isn’t it great feeling that you are included in such a world usually preserved for those of high-leveled education?
Second, song of myself is a revolution about the focus and understanding of self, a revolution set forth by an individual. Song of Myself – the title sounds immodest and bragging. Certainly, Whitman matched the content with its title. Everything said in the poem is his view, his thoughts, his way of looking at the world, his way of leading his life, nothing else but him, himself, and his own. What takes the arrogance of the seemingly self-centeredness in this poem is that the view and thought are about others, care about others, and love for others, especially those ignored, belittled, and boycotted from “civil” society. For me, it is more of a voice of acceptance to those who need love the most. It means unconditional generosity rather than seemingly selfishness.
I love unconventional poetic styles.
I feel difficult when I read Walt Whitman’s poems. The length of lines change widely, and some lines are very long. This is my first time to read a poem in this way. Usually, the poems are very brief and make me spend more time to understand. After I read his poem, I find out that there are no rhymes, so I think that his poems are very interesting. Rhymes can make a poem sounds better and catch readers’ attention, so Poets love to use rhymes. Walt Whitman was a very special poet because he didn’t follow the common rules and used his own way to write a poem. However, I cannot really understand what he trying to express. I agree that the whole poem is talking about “Myself” which makes me feel that Walt Whitman was very confident. His last two lines “Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.” I think that he encourages readers to think about “self” and search for the boundaries of “self”.