Reply to comment

Whitman is a strange poet to read. At first I found him to be a hopeless idealist, an odd mix of Ernest Hemingway's gruff macho man and Annie Dillard's interospective nature lover. I read Leaves of Grass as a possible lifestyle choice, one that involved rolling in the grass and living life as freely as possible. Nice in thought but not so nice in practice. I never exprected that Whitman would have been asking me to join him in his grass-rolling. As we discussed transcendentalism in our group today I realized that perhaps that was the point of whitman. His book was less of a window into his life, as a how to guide to lead it ourselves.

Whitman wants us to enjoy life as much as he does, and so he gives us his mind, his thoughts, his life, forever recorded in a poem. Leaves of Grass is Walt Whitman, an extremely persuasive Whitman who (in his presentation of himself) makes sure to whisper sweet nothings in our ear in the hope that we will hear them and join him. I don't want to call Leaves of Grass a seductive book but I don't think Whitman would object to it being classified as seductive.