There was once a time when I was young and thought that the world revolved around having fun, that I thought that poems were worthless. I thought that they were a loss of time and that even worse teachers forced us to write poems. I used to write them full of feeling with the things that I liked in my life trying to sound the most emotive as possible. After all those poems that I had to write in a forced way I started to get a certain understanding to what poetry is supposed to mean. Each time I gave the poems a bigger effort and started to realize that it is not just placing all your feeling in a paper because almost anyone can do that, it is about through your feelings making the reader understand a new way of viewing life. I think that that is what separates a true poet from a normal one and it is his ability to communicate his thoughts of the world through his feelings. When I read the poems of Walt Whitman in his book of poems called Leaves Of Grass I saw this expression of his views through his poems. According to Whitman: "You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books" (chapter2). When I read this I really liked the meaning he was trying to get trough. What I could get from this is that he wants people to stop looking at things from outside the real thing. He wants people to be related directly to the thing they are talking about not to be bystanders and look at what happens. I understood it more like a call for action, to stop dreaming so much and get into action to pursue that dream. I actually like this message because it is making the readers find out what kind of person Whitman was during his life time. From this part of his poem I could imagine him doing everything possible within his reach to pursue his dreams instead of dreaming he could have them and taking no action.
While I was reading I became interested in knowing who Walt Whitman was. I then went into Wikipedia and entered Walt Whitman to see more about his life and how it could relate to some of his poems. I saw that in the important events in his life his father died and in that same year he published the first edition of Leaves Of Grass. When I read his poems I also got the feeling that he talked a lot about the soul and death. This could have a big relation to his father's death because the loss of a loved one can really affect the view of life. In chapter five he mentions the soul when he says "I believe in you, my Soul—the other I am must not abase itself to you; And you must not be abased by the other," and the soul is the most essential part of existence. A body without a soul is just a body, but with the soul it is a human being. The soul is really the essence of the person and when he talks about the soul he talks about him as a friend and another person. He may be referring to the soul of his father and that person who was his very close friend. In the other quotation he mentions death. According to Whitman: "And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier" (chapter6). He sees death as a good thing. Death here is described as a thing that normally people do not know. I think the general idea of death for people is that it is bad but, when Whitman says that for his it is not that way he must be meaning that it is something good and luckier as he says. Now that I know more of his background I might be seeing the poems he wrote through different eyes because when such a traumatic event happens in the life of a person it is certain that that person's view of life will change.
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