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What makes Walt Whitman’s “To a Stranger” so compelling?
To understand the emotion behind this poem, we must first understand the time in which it was written and the fascinating man behind the pen.
Poetry, like all art, is subject to interpretation. What may be a masterpiece to you, could be unintelligible to another person. As lovers and collectors of art in all forms — music, canvas, writing, street graffiti, the cinema — we accept this unspoken rule.
However, how often do we consider what the artist thought and felt? How important is context to our understanding or admiration of a piece of art?
On the latest episode of the tiff loves words podcast, we dive into that context for an especially compelling piece by American poet Walt Whitman.
Walt Whitman was born in the 19th century during the Second Great Awakening. It was a time of great social change in the United States. Every day life was infused with revolutionary spirit, from the collapsing of empires and the birth of a nation to religious transformation and rapid industralization.
America had just declared independence in 1776 and doing its best to shake off colonial influence. In 1789, the country elected its first president and introduced the Bill of…
