Analysis Of Finding Self Walt Whitman

Finding Self, Whitman’s Way: The One Among the Crowd “The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day; The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme-myself disintegrated, everyone disintegrated, yet part of the scheme” (Whitman. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.). Walt Whitman was a graceful, yet outlaw poet that pushed the boundaries ink and paper. Whitman’s works were a journey of finding self through the natural world and his relation to the world, along with cleaver wording that test the limits of his time. He asked questions that particularly did not coincide with the time he was writing in, but resinate with anyone who hums through one of his poems. A few works where Whitman really explores self and peace in the naturally …show more content…
In this poem, he uses the comparison for the speakers interactions with the water as a reflection of self, almost that of how a mirror reflects oneself. Whitman also sees the speaker in the passing of people on the ferry as they experience what he has and how that is timeless, “Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd” (Whitman. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry). He also uses the poem “Kosmos” to ask the “big questions”, or questions of life and existence in general. “Kosmos” is not only poem that is about finding oneself, but it is also a poem about find the meaning of one’s existence, with questions like “ Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth” (Whitman. “Kosmos), Whitman opens the reader up to not just finding oneself in this world, but also the means of existence in entirety as a mortal being. Whitman does a beautiful job of guiding the reader to expand their mind and search for theirselves as they read his …show more content…
By using repetition through the lines where the speaker is taking about numbers and data, Whitman creates a dynamic of fast pasted and chaos that contrast with the last few lines, where the speaker finds peace in nature/ the night sky. This dynamic creates a nice tension that brings the reader to the same peace as the speaker by the end of the poem. While Whitman used repetition quite often, he also used parallels in his poetry, and example of this is in “Kosmos,” “Who contains believers and disbelievers….” (Whitman. “Kosmos”.). He creates a parallel between this “unknown” that contains all of these concepts, like believers and disbelievers, and equilibrium in this “unknown”. The technique ties into Whitman’s search for self because it allows the readers and speaker to discover their own meaning of self in the “unknown” or natural