Spontaneous me

Chelsey Wilkins


The poem “Spontaneous Me” was written by Walt Whitman. The first expression from the poem was that this person didn’t know what to write about yet he managed to appeal to parts of the rhetoric triangle. This poem is very general but yet self-explanatory.



Whitman had interesting choices of diction. He used many nouns and adjectives but just not by their selves yet together with a time of day or a place. For instance, “the wet woods through the early hours.” The phrase kind of brings a little imagery to my mind like what wet wood would look like at this time of day. Another example is, “the limpid liquid within the youngman.” Not only does Whitman describe the liquid but he’s like hey this is what the liquid is like you could find it in a boy not just any but like a young man.


Whitman appealed to an infinite amount of figurative language in this poem. Everything he talks about is compared to something either using a metaphor or a simile. Now his choice in figurative language kind of gave me an idea about his characteristics as a person. To me Whitman comes out as a detailed poet maybe someone who likes to include a lot of details, which could possibly be the reason why he uses so many comparisons in his work.


Lastly, Whitman showed pathos. The poem comes across as maybe just a list of things that you may observe if you look hard enough but I don’t believe that’s the only message here. Whitman most likely listed the beautiful things in life one may notice if they just stopped in looked. It’s like not a list of things you could do to go to hell or anything like that, but a detailed list about beautiful things in life, where they are, what time, and what time they are there.


To conclude, Whitman is an emotional person. From his work, I assumed that he tries to look at the brighter things in life. Whitman appealed to a couple points of the rhetoric triangle mainly pathos. I thought that Whitman was a bad poet but came to find out he is a very detail oriented person and notices some of the appealing things in the world that most don’t.