"To You Stranger" Follow Up Essay
Amber Lynn Elsenheimer
Mrs. Hand
English III Honors
21 April 2013
“To You, Stranger” Follow up Essay
Walt Whitman is considered one of America’s most influential Poets of all time. He wrote
In a way that the “common man” could appreciate using free verse and a simple vocabulary. In my poem,
“To You, Stranger”, I imitate Walt Whitman’s style and tone, appreciating his originality as a poet.
In multiple poems I have found that Walt Whitman sees brief, chance encounters with strangers as an appropriate opportunity for the strangers to interact. That was a goal of mine while writing my poem, but I decided to take it to the next step making it seem as though the narrator is in love with this stranger and that they could possibly become lovers in the future. Throughout the poem the stranger is skeptical whether or not they should talk to whom they are longing for themselves. They repeat they will not speak to this person, but wait. At the end they question
“ Then again, Why should I not speak to you…” (14). This changes the flow and leaves the reader wanting answers as to If the stranger decided to approach the person whom they long to meet. Often in Poems, Walt Whitman would use anaphora. I used this device in my poem multiple times. For example I repeated “I am to wait” in the third stanza and, “I am not to speak to you” in the fourth. Whitman poems were written in free verse which is how I wrote mine as well. It does not use meter, rhyme, or have any other pattern, thus it is flowing like natural speech. One more device I used while writing this poem would be imagery. It is written in a way that one could see this person staring, infatuated by this stranger. The reader can just imagine the expression on their face and they are carefully studying this person. Walt Whitman was A humanist, he was a part of the movement between realism and transcendentalism. He included both of these views in his work. He used free verse and made his
Mrs. Hand
English III Honors
21 April 2013
“To You, Stranger” Follow up Essay
Walt Whitman is considered one of America’s most influential Poets of all time. He wrote
In a way that the “common man” could appreciate using free verse and a simple vocabulary. In my poem,
“To You, Stranger”, I imitate Walt Whitman’s style and tone, appreciating his originality as a poet.
In multiple poems I have found that Walt Whitman sees brief, chance encounters with strangers as an appropriate opportunity for the strangers to interact. That was a goal of mine while writing my poem, but I decided to take it to the next step making it seem as though the narrator is in love with this stranger and that they could possibly become lovers in the future. Throughout the poem the stranger is skeptical whether or not they should talk to whom they are longing for themselves. They repeat they will not speak to this person, but wait. At the end they question
“ Then again, Why should I not speak to you…” (14). This changes the flow and leaves the reader wanting answers as to If the stranger decided to approach the person whom they long to meet. Often in Poems, Walt Whitman would use anaphora. I used this device in my poem multiple times. For example I repeated “I am to wait” in the third stanza and, “I am not to speak to you” in the fourth. Whitman poems were written in free verse which is how I wrote mine as well. It does not use meter, rhyme, or have any other pattern, thus it is flowing like natural speech. One more device I used while writing this poem would be imagery. It is written in a way that one could see this person staring, infatuated by this stranger. The reader can just imagine the expression on their face and they are carefully studying this person. Walt Whitman was A humanist, he was a part of the movement between realism and transcendentalism. He included both of these views in his work. He used free verse and made his