Walt Whitman Research Paper

Walt Whitman was a nineteenth century poet who made a large impact on the world through his work. Though his poetry was not accepted in his time, today, he is quite revered for his visionary ideas explored in them. His most comprehensive work, Leaves of Grass, Whitman often discusses common themes of literature, such as death. On the subject of death, rather than examine it in a morbid, depressing manner, Whitman’s work conveys that death is a unifying part of life that needs to be accepted. He explains this from various angles in his poems The Sleepers and Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.

The Sleepers is an excellent example of Whitman’s views on death. It describes a world of people, all asleep in different places and having different dreams. The narrator, who is observing the sleepers, realizes that in sleep, “The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall flow and unite”(7). Sleeping is one of the few actions everyone has in common. Whitman goes on to compare sleep to death, as both are natural and coalescing

This poem, in an unusual style for Whitman, tells the story of his younger self hearing the anguished song of a bird, who had lost his mate. The bird is upset over this lost mostly because he misses his mate, and fears she may be dead, and to the young Whitman was touched as he “pour’d forth the meaning which I of all men know.” Though a child, he sympathized with the bird, and began to understand for himself the pain of death and loss. This conveys how death is something that affects everyone, another way that it connects people. Whitman cites this as the moment when he realized his calling as a poet, as he learned something very important. Curious, he asks the bird to tell him of “the word final, superior to all,” to which the bird responds “death.” This poem adds to Whitman’s message of death being an inevitable part of life that binds all living