Leaves of Grass Post

The paragraph from the preface of Leaves of Grass is the strongest paragraph in the whole excerpt. Although the paragraph does not do an excellent job of using poetic devices or imagery to get it's point across, it does a great job at smacking you in the face with the ideas spread throughout the poetry. The paragraph starts of by flat out telling you what you will do. It does not recommend how you should live, it flat out says, "This is what you shall do." This strong language does a great job of setting the author up. It helps illustrate that the author is going to give you guidelines and rules that you should live your life by. The first guideline or rule that is laid stated is, "Love the earth and sun and the animals." It is not shocking that this is the first rule stated because the romantics are all for nature and finding God in nature. Therefore it makes perfect sense that the first rule says that you should love nature, because according to the romantics, without love for nature, you will never find God. The next group of rules is "despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others." These rules are also strongly rooted in romantic ideals. Despising riches, giving alms, and devoting income are all very typical of romantics because they thought property was basically useless. Therefore you have no need for money so why not give it to others who cherish it much more than you do. If you are a true romantic you have already found God in nature and have no need for money so why not give it to people who cherish it more than anything. Since they haven't found God, let them find joy in the money that is useless to you. Standing up for the stupid and crazy could be a romantic thought because they are not priviledged enough to have found God, and since you are, you should help them in any way possible. The next couple rules basically say that you should not bow down to any power. There is no man greater than another, and the only person who you should feel inferior to is God. But God is also something you should not argue about because arguements are not peaceful and are pointless. The only thing that matters is going out into nature and finding God. The nest very powerful rule that really stands out is "go freely with the powerful uneducated person and the young and with the mothers of families." This rule is extremely trancendentalist. The important part is go freely with the uneducated. This is very important because an uneducated person is free of corruption. They believe what they think and not what the are taught or is popular in society. This fits in perfectly with the trancendentalist idea that being an individual is the most important thing because without individuals, everything fails. This also ties in with the next big rules which are, "re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul." This again ties in very strongly with the tracendentalist idea of being an individual. You must examine what you have been taught because if you don't, what you believe is the mush that has been spoon fed to you by society, not ideas that you have personally formulated. Dismissing what offends you brings you closer to enlightenment and makes you an individual, not just another ant marching through society. If this paragraph was something we read out of the actual preface in its entirety, this sentence would stand out because it is oddly punctuated and very long. This would emphasize the ideas present and really hit home harder than it does alone.

Response to Douglass Post

Hi Cam. I know it's a pain in the boopie to type the whole passage, and it isn't absolutely necessary. The benefit, though, is that you'll notice even more about the language and construction of the passage as you type it. As someone who ends up typing a lot of passages in the course of a month, I can assure you, that's true. In this case, it's such a ginormous paragraph that I can see why you didn't type it. You might want to narrow your focus a bit, look at something a little shorter so you can deal with it in more depth.

On page 24, the paragraph starting with the line, "In the same book," and ending with the line "and moved in every storm" is a very power paragraph where Douglass talks of the pain that reading brought him. He talks about how the documents were very interesting to him. He says, "The reading of these documents (one of Sheridan's speeches on Catholic emancipation) enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than the one of which i was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers." This is an extrememly powerful couple sentences that really begin to express how much more Douglass is starting to hate slavery. Yup, diction--abhor, detest He now starts to realize that with the power of reading, he can take down arguments taht others bring up in the realm of how slavery is a good thing. Antithesis forming! Douglass really starts to realize that with reading he has knowledge, and with that knowledge he gains the power to become a very influential abolitionist later in his life. I don't get the feeling that he sees himself as an abolitionist yet; he just recounts the birth of his awareness of his condition. Later on in the quoted section, Douglass really uses parallel structure to emphasize how much pain the reading brought him, although the knowledge was beneficial, and how much he began to hate slave owners, his in particular, for the brutality that they subjected him to. Take us to a "so what" here--he discusses this to appeal to an audience that values reason, knowledge, education. To say he envied his fellow slaves' stupidity is quite surprising. He talks of how reading really opens his eyes to the brutality and makes him despise it that much more. Douglass goes on to emphasize the cruelty of slavers by comparing them to robbers who stole the slaves from Africa. This metaphor does a very good job of showing how slavers aren't people who should be making money like they do. His point is that lik robbers, slavers too should be tried and jailed for their crimes. Not paid and begged for more slaves. After his comparison of slavers to robbers, Douglass has an epiphany. He realizes that this hatred for slavery that was strengthened even more by the knowledge of reading, was the exact reason why his master didn't want him reading. He realizes that to his master, an ignorant slave is much more valuable and manageable than on full of knowledge. You're summarizing a lot in here, largely because the passage is large and you're trying to cover a lot of ground. The knowledge that Douglass has gained from his reading make him more likely to rebel or run away than when he was ignorant. He does a great job of emphasizing this point with the metaphor that slavery is like a pit, and reading had opened his eyes to the fact that slavery is a horrible pit, and though he was thankful he had the knowledge to realize this, reading also showed him that there was no ladder he could use to get out of the pit. Good job here, especially given our association of education with upward mobility. Notice just how smart this metaphor is. Instead of propelling him forth from his condition, education makes him feel further bound--irony would not be lost on his audience. He was stuck in slavery forever. His freedom was so close that he could taste it, bu tit was seemingly unreachable at the same time. Douglass finishes off this paragraph using parallel structure show it to tell how freedom was in everything he saw, touched or heard but although Douglass was so close to it, he could never reach freedom, and that is what tormented him. The knowledge that reading had brought him was like torture because although it opened his eyes to how close freedom was, he knew that it was a very unlikely, seemingly unreachable goal. This section is rooted deeply in pathos and is trying to get the audience, mostly well, including white women white women, to feel pity for him. He makes a deeper connection with the audience, allowing him to persuade them to his realm of thinking, in which slavery is terrible.