Walt Whitmen

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

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 ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

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 ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: