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Example research essay topic: Leaves Of Grass Love And Friendship - 1,046 words

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John Bell Mrs. Taylor English 2 May 30, 2000 All Alone Walter Whitman was an American poet of the 1800 's. Walt was arguably one of America's influential and innovative poets of his time. Whitman began work as a printer and journalist in the New York City area.

He wrote articles on politics, civics, and the arts. During the Civil War, Whitman was a volunteer assistant in the military hospitals in Washington, D. C. After the war, he worked in several government departments until he suffered a stroke in 1873. He spent the rest of his life in Camden, N. J. , where he continues to write poems and articles.

Leaves of Grass, a book of poems Whitman began in 1848 was so unusual at the time that no publisher would publish it. In 1855, he published it himself. Between 1855 and his death, Whitman published several revised and enlarged editions of his book. Walt sent a copy of the book to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ralph would send the poet an enthusiastic letter which he hailed him "at the beginning of a great career" (Whitman 732).

Walt believed that Leaves of Grass had grown with his own intellectual development. Calamus, a section of poems in Leaves of Grass is a section talking about love and friendship. Poems in Calamus have been put in and taken out through the years with the revisions of the book. Two poems that can be found in Calamus today are "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" and "To a Stranger. " These two poems have not been Calamus together since the beginning of the book, but now they are together and very similar.

Since love and friendship are two major aspects that Whitman was looking for in life. He wrote many poems on those topics alone. Calamus is group of poems that explain love and friendship. "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" and "To a Stranger" are two poems that explain his loneliness and his wanting of a companion. Whitman uses people and objects to symbolize his thoughts and feelings.

Calamus is a series of letters written during the years 1868 to 1880 by Whitman to a young Civil War companion, Peter Doyle, the unsophisticated Washington horsecar conductor. The letters have been published under the appropriate title Calamus, as they constitute a record of precisely the kind of relationship Whitman meant to describe by that title. " The terms of endearment Whitman uses in these letters are lavish and suggest metaphorically the character of the emotion motivating his attachment" (Allen 25). It is difficult to challenge the purity and spirituality of the feelings Whitman and Doyle had for each other. Many cant figure out what was between them. "There can be no doubt that these feelings transcend those usual to friends or companions of the same sex" (Allen 25). Whitman was a homosexual and many of his poems relate to manly love. "To the serious reader of Calamus, the 'manly love' that recurs both as a term and as an idea is of such genuine poetic complexity as to render it a good deal more than 'abnormal' and considerably less than 'deficient'" (Canby 124).

The poems also show the friendship of men and women through his life. Calamus is a section that has changed along with the revisions of the book. The poems came and gone with how Walt felt each poem held up in each section. " No section in Leaves of Grass has received so much close attention and been the center of so much discussion and controversy as Calamus" (Bliss 288). Whitman's own saintlike, spiritual life shows as proof that the poems could not be unwholesome. "William Sloane Kennedy calls Calamus, "Whitman's beautiful democratic poems of friendship" (Bliss 288). The purity, innocence, and spirituality of the Calamus concept cannot be missed. The idea in not original with Whitman.

As he states, " the Calamus idea was expressed by all mankind's saviors and has frequently been expressed by the term 'brotherly love'" (Bliss 289). In the early stages of Calamus poems there were twelve in number and had as their title and unifying symbol, 'Live Oak with Moss. ' "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" was one of the first twelve, "To a Stranger" didn't come till later. "This twelve poem series is am artistically complete story of attachment, crisis, and renunciation and was motivated by some specific emotional experience" (Bliss 293). Through time some of the poems would leave the section and lines would be changed in some. Contrary to frequent implications by Whitman's critics, his revisions of Calamus over a period of some thirty years do not reveal that he was trying to cover up or change the original character of the group of poems. The 1860 version of Calamus had forty-five poems, by the time of Whitman's last edition, it had been reduced to thirty-nine. "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" was one of the first poems that Whitman put into Calamus. It took Walt two months in New Orleans in the spring of 1848 to write this poem.

This poem was originally intended as the key poem of Calamus. In 1860 this poem was place number twenty of the Calamus poems. This poem is about Walt himself. "The Live-Oak poem evidently originated in some private experiences that happened to Whitman" (Allen & Davis 178). Whitman's loneliness mad him feel wanted and needed. "But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves all its life without friend or lover near, for I knew I could not" (Whitman 126). Whitman thought that if he was going to do something great that he couldn't do it alone. He feels that if he doesn't have a friend of lover near, the will be nothing that will drive him to success.

The tree in "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" was alone with no other tree to be next to. "Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself" (Whitman 126). Whitman felt that he was alone in the world just like the tree was standing with no companion near to grow with. Whitman was alone during this time o...


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