![]() Yet I am happy, because you have found me out. I freely confess I am wholly disreputable. Then, vastly amused – ‘Why do you reproach me? I advertised? Were my words not sufficiently plain?Īnd those who have taken my moods for prophecies Yet, did I not warn you that it was Myself I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,I. Only a poet pauses to read the inscription.’ Song of Myself, 52 - The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. ‘As for the people – see how they neglect you! And he seems friendly.Īnd the light above the street is sick to death. 14, 2020 APSIX DAYS AFTER the first cannonades of the Civil War boomed out at Fort Sumter, S.C., Walt Whitman, the great ennobler of the American soul, made a. Why Italy? Why red? Sorry, Louis Simpson, but I need a bit of help with this one. ![]() The last line, ‘Dances like Italy, imagining red’, is a resounding one but I have to confess I don’t understand it. But then there is a change of mood that seems to stem from a feeling of being released from the burden of expectation: ‘All that grave weight of America/Cancelled’. Opening your own fast-food joint? Getting a cameo role in The Simpsons? Coming over here, marrying one of our princes and carting him off to Canada? Whatever it is, the poet clearly feels that it has led his people down the wrong road, and that the nation they were promised has become lost in a rising tide of uncaring consumerism: ‘The Open Road goes to the used-car lot’, and only poets stop to read inscriptions. ![]() For one thing, I am not even sure exactly what the ‘American dream’ is. From 1830 to 1836 he held various jobs, some of them on newspapers in Brooklyn and. In 1823, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Walt had his schooling (1825-30). His father, Walter, was a laborer, carpenter, and house builder. I really like it for its lyricism, but am aware that as an English reader I am almost certainly missing some of its cultural nuances. Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, New York on May 31, 1819. This poem by the American poet Louis Simpson (1923-2012) seems to be primarily about disillusionment with the American way of life, though it ends on a note of apparent hope. ![]()
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