Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | The Sea in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature - Robin Riley Fast (essay date 1982)

Robin Riley Fast (essay date 1982)

SOURCE: “Structure and Meaning in Whitman's Sea-Drift,” in American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 53, Winter, 1982, pp. 49-66.

[In the following essay, Fast examines Whitman's Sea-Drift poems as a whole, focusing on how their organization within the larger Leaves of Grass helps to develop the overall themes of self-exploration and the promise of transcendence.]

Criticism of Whitman's Sea-Drift sequence has been almost entirely limited to analyses of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life.” Although many critics have commented on the contrasts between these two poems, none has thoroughly examined Sea-Drift as a whole. Instead, critics have noted the presence of sea imagery,¹ or have made general statements about themes. For example, James E. Miller states that Sea-Drift develops the theme of the...

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