Reading Notes Week 8 Part B

Reading Notes 

Week 8

Part B

• Walt Whitman left an astonishing legacy by bringing free verse poetry to modern practice. He saw poets as leaders and fighters. Whitman strayed away from poetry ordinary rhyme and meter approach. His poems also included a heavy sense of prized free and sexual pleasures. 
• With this bubbling new era of poetry an era that was laced with poets who before Whitman would have no place in poetry those who were defiant, energetic, and willing to experiment. 
• Born on Long Island and moved to Brooklyn as child Whitman dropped out of school at the tender age of 11 to work random odd jobs. As he became older he worked jobs as a school teacher, builder, bookstore owner, journalist, and poet. 
• Whitman personally loved the South but imposed its slavery and petitioned against it and looked up to public figures at the time like Abraham Lincoln. 
• In 1865 he met Peter Doyle who eventually became his lover and he moved to Camden, New Jersey were he resided at for the rest of his life. 
• He worked on poet at a young age and wrote a bunch of good and bad poems and eventually came up with a collection that was titled "Leaves of Grass" which he had to revise man of times probably till his death just because how bad the critiques attacked his art but in future time he would be appreciated call Whitman ahead of his time.
• I like how Whitman structured his poems they are spaced perfectly and are long stanzas like a story. But it is truly hard to follow the meaning of his poems or should I say understanding the meanings of the poems. Starting with the titles being the subject of the poem in the beginning and as you go on reading in my experience the subject of the poem got farther away from how it was started. 
• pg. 465 this poem has to be the easiest to follow and is like a song in a musical which in the beginning introduction said Whitman enjoyed theater. says it on pg. 447 at the mid top of the left side of the page. 
• And on pg.  399 is a start of a poem that is quiet familiar to me I don't know from where but I felt like I have read it before