After reading the packet assigned this week, I am scratching my head at Walt Whitman's purpose in "Song of Myself." I'm not the biggest fan of long poetry (I find it arduous to read and impossible to care about, save for Poe's "The Raven"), so naturally I got bored after the first few stanzas. As I started to read "Song of Myself," I noticed that the stanzas in which he talks about himself, I feel repelled by his language, his contradiction and his subtle egoism. With declarations like, "Walt Whitman am I, a Kosmos, of mighty Manhattan the son...No sentimentalist - no stander above men and women, or apart from them," and "I celebrate myself...For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you," he straddles between tooting his own horn and raving about the world and his modesty. So I question what his true intention is in this poem: to celebrate himself, as his first line declares, or to emphasize the greatness of the world around him.
My second question comes from "The Freedman's Story." The article, written by William Parker, recounts his confrontation with slave-catchers. When I finished the article, I wondered why, throughout this time in history, slave owners were so intent on catching runaway slaves. Was it because if they let one go, they might all try to escape? Or is it more than for show? Does the slave owner actually find worth in one escaped slave, enough to send a whole gang of slave-catchers after him? Are slaves that hard to replace? Wouldn't it be easier to let a troublesome slave run away rather than struggle to beat the work out of him (assuming that the slaves most likely to chance their life by running away are the ones most resistant to working)? I want to understand better the dynamics between a slave owner and his slaves - not just that they owned them, but how valuable a slave was to them, and what conditions decided whether or not they sent pursuers after an escapee.
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