Whitman and His Peers

        Apart from The Village Blacksmith by Henry Wadsworth Youngfellow, the two other poems I read were Fredericksburg by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and An Incident by Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Aside from Whitman, the other three poets try to keep a rhyme scheme. Whitman abandons rhyme for the most part. Still, I see some sort of connection from all three poems to Whitman’s Song of Myself. The Village Blacksmith is about… a village blacksmith (duhhhh), and half of the poem just describes his work and routine, which is not unlike the way in which Whitman describes many of the everyday people he writes about in his poem. An Incident has some formal similarities to Song of Myself in that the writer ponders the thought of how magnificent it would be to be the eagle in her romantic description of it. She humbles herself at the thought, saying that she would not soar as beautifully as the eagle. This resembles Whitman’s description of nature, which usually finds himself standing in awe of nature while simultaneously envisioning himself as one with nature. Fredericksburg is a bit different in the connection I find with Whitman. It describes the battlefield of Fredericksburg. I think the writer is in a time a couple of years after the battles of the Civil War took place there, and he is imagining the battles that took place on those fields just a few years back. Immediately, I think of how the war inspired artists. In the case of poetry, the author of Fredericksburg was inspired to write a poetic snapshot of a battle, and Whitman’s poem was also a response to the war, though he takes it on in a different manner.
        All four of the poets use romantic elements to discuss their subjects, though their subjects vary (Whitman has connections to all the subjects as his poem is long and expansive). From reading the other poems, I see connections to nature, war, and the working man in the three different poems, and it works to show what was on the minds of artists at the time, and why it would seem natural for Whitman to include connections to all three aspects of life at the time in his poetry as well.