Hudson : The East River

Abstract

This paper deals with Walt Whitman's poetry in a very non-convential way, and it tries to explore some of his well-known features which place him as the initiator of a colective poetry. Whitman remains mid-way between "palefaces" and "redskins" and, in our opinión, he represents a new starting point from which the quest for unity is essential. For that reason we study in our paper two of the main ideas he develops in his poetry: the idea of Identification (identity) between the self and the other, and the idea of the visión of the American world, the American soul, as a mass of people on permanent pilgrimage along an inmense green-grass field. We bring to our paper the medieval dream-vision metaphor because we think that Whitman has this medieval visionary tone; on the other hand we quote Federico García Lorca's "Oda a Walt Whitman" for the Spanish poet sees in Whitman that deep concern with humanity.