Essay On Walt Whitman's Use Of Anaphora

Through the clever use of anaphora, well-chosen appropriate diction, and varied sentence structures, Whitman was able to emphasize and effectively portray to the reader how learning from the astronomer was boring and useless while learning from nature was superior. By doing so, Whitman was able to extend the ideal of transcendentalism that true knowledge is gained from first hand experiences from nature and not from traditional learning practices and reading books. Whitman’s use of anaphora in the first four lines highlights how uninteresting the learning techniques of the astronomers were. He uses the anaphora over and over again in the first four lines to set a contrast between the first four lines where he was bored by the teaching of

He, in the first five lines, refers in detail to all the astronomical information presented to him without describing them to add a sense of dryness and abstraction to the concepts and show how uninteresting they were. “ Proofs”, “figures”, “columns”, ”charts”, “diagrams”, “add”, “divide” and “measure” were all listed one after the other to highlight the quantity of the materials the astronomers provided. More importantly, however, they were stacked in the poem one after the other without any description to emphasize how they lacked quality. They did not deserve a vivid illustration as to what they are. They did not even deserve a single adjective that would beautify them ever so slightly and take them out of the position of abstraction they are put in the poem. In fact, Whitman decides to adopt the astronomers’ preference of quantity over quality for just the first five lines of the poem to show how it was flawed. He, like the astronomers, overwhelms his readers with facts about the multitudes of materials he experienced without providing any explanation or description to add some meaning to them or paint a picture of them in the brains of the readers like how a poet would to show, and not tell, how futile