1. Today: Be One With your New Seat Intro to Walt Whitman Homework: This Compost

2. Emerson: “The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.”

4. Walt Whitman 1819-1892 Inspired by Thoreau and Emerson Said: “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”

5. Poetic Form Free Verse (Like the expanding nation) Unstructured, no limits on lines/stanzas

6. FREE VERSE A form of poetry composed of either rhymed or unrhymed lines that have no set fixed metrical pattern 20 th Century poets were pioneers of this which allowed them to break from formula/ rigidity of traditional poetry

7. Poetic devices to look for: Repetition: (Anaphora) Alliteration: Repeating sounds at the beginning of words Assonance: Repeated vowel sounds Consonance: Repeated consonant sounds Parallel structure: phrases/lines whose pattern is similar Cadence: rising and falling Juxtaposition: two contrasting images, side by side

8. Devices continued… Metaphors and similes: descriptive comparisons Sibilance: consonants making a hissing sound “s” or “sh” Montage: several brief images, pictures placed side by side for effect Personification Imagery Lists 1 st person “I” = “eye”?

9. Themes/Subjects Romantic view of nature Body and Soul are one Nature is God Rebirth and Regeneration Death is a part of life Symbols of regeneration (grass on graves) Value of the Everyday Dignity of the common person/labor Power of Poetry to transcend time Speaks to future generations

10. Homework Complete annotations of: “I Saw In Louisiana A Live Oak Growing” Annotate “This Compost”