Reverse Engineering Your Writing
Attributing purpose to your writing:
Requirements: Meaning of the poem, how it displays Romantic ideals, literary devices and how
they help to convey meaning. Role as an argument.
Argumentative claim: Proper format, Focus on Meaning, Explanation of Romantic ideals,
Identification of and explanation of how literary devices convey meaning.
In Walt Whitman’s, “When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” the Romantic ideal of man defining the
value of his existence as a correlation between his personal experiences in the natural world is
emphasized by the clear denunciation of institutionalized learning and a celebration of a whimsical, yet
reverent, opportunity to enjoy the infinite pleasure of the “mystical” aspects of the natural world.
Whitman’s use of anaphora to emphasize the laborious, and his use of flying imagery as his speaker tiptoes across alliterative natural images emphasizes the release he feels as he slinks into a natural
experience. As his speaker endures the drone of the astronomer’s lecture in the opening four lines, the
repetition of “when” to begin each line acts to catalog his growing displeasure. Each line grows longer,
even further emphasizing the redundancy in this anaphora, and of the speaker’s dissatisfaction.
However, like a ghost, or perhaps as in a dream, the image of the speaker “rising and gliding out”
enhances the surreal escape from his bondage in the lecture hall. Simply walking out, would not do.
The release from the confines of the “canned” lecture, and limitations of “knowledge” from the “charts
and diagrams” and “the proofs, the figures” is juxtaposed with the alliteration of “mystical moist (night
air)” and “silence at the stars” that reveal the wisdom gained in joining with the natural world.
Whitman’s speaker personifies the Romantic ideal of individual experience, not with a litany of
information, but with the revelation that the prize of life is discovered when one “look’d up”.
Argumentative claim: Proper format, Focus on Meaning, Explanation of Romantic ideals,
Identification of and explanation of how literary devices convey meaning.