Response to !Walt Whitman! Post

Section 16 is a great choice. Right at the heart of his message about himself. The first thing in the section of writing that I noticed was the opposites he used to describe himself. He said the young and the old, the foolish and the wise, the child and the man, the man and the women. He uses opposites because it helps be the great equalizer. Exactly. He undermines the notion of being able to define ourselves in opposition to other concepts; he says it's all part and parcel of this universal whole. By saying he is all of these things it makes him relate able to nearly all people because he covers all the bases with the opposites. And by doing that everyone likes him well, except the people who found this creepy and distasteful because he is saying he is similar to nearly every human and people like to listen to other people who relate to them. He goes on and on not only with opposites, but with all sorts of different kinds of jobs and religions just to make him even more relate able not a word, dearest to all of his readers. He also says that he is relate able to all of the people in america that he is at home all over the country, so he is making himself similar to everybody in at least one way. And by doing that he is making people unify over him and come together because everyone will have something in common with him and he will be the connecting link between the opposite people. Keep going here! Think of the historical moment! Why would this be so very important post-Civil War? As a person who loved his country, Whitman was devastated to see what the war was like and how people stood on the field of battle killing their fellow citizens. The next thing in these passage I noticed was how lovely the diction and syntax was. When you read it, it just flows through your lips so smoothly and it just sounds very nice. He uses alliteration alot at the end of the section with the sound, with the suns I can see and the suns I cannot see. and the in the two last stanzas how he says place so many times, it really gets sunk into your head that that is one of the points he is trying to get across to you. The sound of the "s" creates a lasting whisper effect, too--powerful. The last thing that I really noticed was the parallel structure that he used in these section but also all throughout the only essay. poem It is a good technic to use because it makes everything in a list he is making more and more powerful, I can almost feel the writing getting louder and louder and more passionaite until it just peaks and then he changes the structure and starts with something new. In this sense, repetition in poetry works a lot like repetition in music; the volume of repeated notes increases as you go, increasing intensity. It makes what he is trying to say so much more powerful. It also give structure to a "free verse" poem. Free verse does not mean random. Whitman's poetry is highly structured and rhythmic. Things like the repetition, balanced lines, and catalogs create that.