Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Themes

Though Whitman wasn't directly associated with the movement, he is often lumped in with American Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The Transcendentalists believed...

Walt Whitman wants to be friends with you. He's the kind of guy who walks into a coffee shop and shakes everyone's hands and tries to strike up a conversation with other customers. Just notice how...

The more things change, the more they stay the same. That's pretty much the message of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" as it relates to time. Walt Whitman takes comfort in the idea that all people have t...

The speaker of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is blown-away by, like, everything he sees. He's like a small child in a shopping mall: "Wow! An electric nose-hair trimmer!" He doesn't divide the world up...

Ah, the hardest part of a Whitman poem: figuring out just who's doing the talking. Who is this "I" who claims to be watching us like a ghost? The speaker tries to identify with everything in the wo...