The second essay assignment draft is coming due next week. Click on the syllabus link and scroll down until you find it.

The big plan for Walt Whitman is to spend most of class reading the poem aloud. This doesn't mean don't read it before then because if you don't practice with the reading, you'll stumble all over yourself as you read the passages that come your way. For your journal, having read "Song of Myself," find three passages that you think to be quintessentially American (I'll let you decide what that means; this is your 'X') or Transcendental (we haven't discussed this, so you'll have to look it up yourself, try Wikipedia) in their perspective. What is it that these passages do and mean? Write about why you think this to be the case. Be sure to provide some of the poem. While Whitman is writing about himself in some respects, he is viewing himself as the embodiment of everything American. Keep this in mind as you write and while you respond to at least three journals. Just like him, you too are the America and Americans he is writing about.