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garleighc's Reviews (2.22k)
It's hard to bang out 450+ pages of Walt Whitman in a week. I'll admit, I was reading this for fun, not for deep intellectual conversation with the text, so my analysis and how much I understood of all his poetry was somewhat stunted. But I don't mind. It was a nice break to just stare at the words and let them run through my head and then right back out again... although certain works stuck more than others. Of course, "When I Heard The Learn'd Astronomer" gave me some painful Breaking Bad flashbacks. But "Enfans D'Adam" read like pure erotica, it was beautiful yet made me stomach squirm, and that poem will stick with me a long time. "When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd" will haunt me forever. "Come Up From The Fields, Father" made me die a little. And of course, everything he "promulgates" in Leaves Of Grass just strikes me as incredibly freeing and optimistic and yet destructive all at once; I feel like I relate to this stuff now more than I ever do. (Did anyone else notice Walt Whitman's fascination with the term "promulgation"? Seemed to be in quite a few of his poems.) I love how he describes himself as "pleased with the sound of my own name" and how he would "stand apart to hear" it from different people's mouths. I've been preoccupied with how people say my name and how I say my name in front of others as opposed to when I'm thinking of myself, and this made me obsess over it a little more. I have so many different thoughts about Whitman's stuff and I'll never be able to explain them or pursue them all at once. Especially not here.
