In the first quarter of Walt Whitman's, "Leaves of Grass" Whitman writes poetry. In this complete book filled with a total of 12 poems. For this months independent reading I bought the original 1855 version, however; over the years after the first edition was released Whitman revised the book to contain almost 400 different poems. This first blog entry includes the introduction- which in itself holds words to be thought over, and also the first portion of the first poems in the book, "Songs of Myself". Whitman was a a transcendentalist writer which means he focuses a lot of his poetry on beliefs on nature and the human race and the beauty it holds. At first his poetry and diction confused me, I was skimming over most of it and it really isn't the kind of book where it is structured to be able to be described in a blog entry. It really is more of a book with ideas and hypothesis which he formulates withing his poetry which is how i plan on writing it. After rereading the pages that in the beginning puzzled me began to make sense. In his introduction Whitman writes of what true poetry is made out of, this is where I got the quote which is the title of the blog. He believes that the poet has a strong connection to nature (which I presume he holds true for himself as well) this is shown in the quote, "...folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects...they expect him to indicate the path between the reality and their souls" (Whitman, 21). Whitman defines the poet as a man who holds a different connection with the world around him, in some cases he defines this connection as a better one. I realize that this first blog entry is mainly focused around the introduction to Whitman's book, however; I believe that without a strong understanding of the introduction it is harder to dissect and understand what Whitman means in his poetry in the following pages.
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