Whitman's Peers

In "Hunters of Men" Whittier addresses the issue of slavery. At first the reader is led to believe that the "hunters of men" are being exalted for their noble job. Later we see that the voice of the poem is sarcastic especially when we get to the line, "land of the brave and this home of the free." Whittier highlights the evil of enslaving those whose only "sin/Is the curl of [their] hair and the hue of [their] skin!" He makes his point by taking the tone of the slave catchers and those who favor slavery by echoing a sentiment that nonsensically must have been used a lot to advocate slavery:"What right have they here in the home of the white,/Shadowed o'er by our banner of Freedom and Right?" This is ridiculous logic since the whites were the ones who forcibly brought the slaves here. He makes the reader see that our notions of being a land founded on freedom were totally hypocritical. Whitman was obviously against slavery so the two poets have that in common and that they use their art to further their beliefs and influence others. I believe Whittier wrote this in iambic hexameter and the rhyme scheme is aabbcc and so on. This is a marked difference from Whitman who wrote is non-rhyming free verse in "Song of Myself."

In "A Dirge for O'Connell" the common thread between Lynch and Whitman is patriotism (albeit Irish rather than American patriotism,) though I don't know if Whitman would have been so quick to praise battle and fighting. She exalts the dead which Whitman does in his poem "Song of Myself" though for different reasons. She writes that O'Connell is a king though not born royal and I think that the merits of a person rather than the class hierarchy one is born into would have appealed to Whitman. He was against the rigid class structure of Europe. Again this poem is written in formal meter, quatrains of iambic trimeter and the rhyme scheme is abcb making this a ballad. This differentiates it from Whitman because he was writing free verse. I think he aimed to make a new type of poetry, one breaking away from the formal constraints of English and Irish poetry.