When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
Walt Whitman walks out of a star lecture to look up at the real night sky — eight lines weighing measured knowledge against pure wonder. Full poem and analysis.
Theme
walt-whitman
3 poems
walt-whitman
Song of Myself (Selected Excerpts)
Walt Whitman’s vast act of self-celebration, where a single “I” absorbs the whole world and waits “somewhere” for every future reader. Selected text and analysis.
O Captain! My Captain!
It’s the poem everyone knows by Whitman and the one he came to resent: a rhymed, sentimental elegy for the assassinated Lincoln from the man who invented American free verse. Here’s why it works, and what it cost him.