Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Walt Whitman
- First Published: 1859
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry, Narrative poetry
- Subjects: New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Memory, Music or musicians, New York City, Poetry or poets, Death or dying, Creative process, Youth, Sea or seafaring life, Songs or songwriters, Birds, Life and death
“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” is a poem of reminiscence, in which the poet, at a crisis in his adult life, looks back to an incident in his childhood when he first became aware of his vocation as a poet. The structure of the poem owes a great deal to music, particularly grand opera, which Whitman loved. He once said that without opera he could not have written Leaves of Grass, and an anonymous review in the Saturday Press in 1860 (which was actually written by Whitman himself) commented, “Walt Whitman's method in the construction of his songs is strictly the...
[The entire page is 976 words long]
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