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Whitman’s Poetry

Those curious about Whitman and his work should explore more of his most well-known poems, including “Song of Myself,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and “I Sing the Body Electric.”

Langston Hughes, “I, Too”

Hughes echoes and rebuts Whitman in his poem. Hughes’s poem offers an important riposte to Whitman’s apparently totalizing vision of America, which neglects to mention the extraordinary “contribution” slaves of African descent have made to the nation.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Walden provides an interesting counterpoint to “I Hear America Singing” for a couple of related reasons. First, even though they arrive at different conclusions, both works think about the proper relation between individual and collective. And second, both see the proper relation between individual and collective as constitutive of the American national spirit.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

As Whitman is to nineteenth-century American poetry, so is Melville to nineteenth-century prose. Both men have reputations as literary titans who were influenced by American Transcendentalism and tackled ambitious themes related to democracy as well as divinity. Though these works are rather different, they nonetheless belong together.

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