Whitman’s poetry received mixed critical acclaim during his lifetime, although he was known across the Atlantic, where English writers such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Alfred, Lord Tennyson had read his work. The origin of that voice is less important than the effect it has on us, its readers, which is to draw us more intimately into the dialogue of the poem: Whitman’s questions become our questions, his answers resonate with ours, his lamentations and joys are experienced as if they were our own. At the end of the poem, he receives his answer, but whether this is issued from the depths of his own consciousness or from a voice separate but close by is unclear. In “O Me! O Life!,” for example, the speaker seems at first to be engaged in dialogue with himself, questioning the world around him and his relation to it all. Indeed, the very notion of dialogue is essential to Whitman’s poetic sensibility. Born in 1819, on Long Island, New York, Whitman lived through the great events of nineteenth-century America, i.e., the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the assassination of President Lincoln westward expansion and the settling of the American prairie industrialization, immigration and the growth of the city much of his poetry engages in a dialogue with this rapidly-changing world. This month, the star of our Poetry Reading Club is America’s first “celebrity poet”: Walt Whitman. POETRY READING CLUB- POEM OF THE MONTH ANALYSIS: “O Me! O Life!” by Walt Whitman

Walt whitman o me