The whole universe and a single blade of grass – what do they have in common? According to Walt Whitman, everything. Whitman believed that everything, even the smallest blade of grass, is as important and special as everything else, and he shows this through parts of many of his poems. Like the transcendentalist writers and poets who preceded him, who believed in the concept of an "oversoul" connecting even the smallest, most insignificant things to everything else, Whitman had a deep respect for the "little things" of life and the world. around him, which contributed to the development of his unique worldview and writing style, and this is reflected particularly well in two of his poems: “Song of Myself” and “On the Beach at Night”. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay “Song of Myself,” arguably Whitman's best-known work, is a collection of scenes that Whitman incorporates into a journey of self-discovery and personal identity, while “On the Beach at Night” tells the story of a young girl and her father observing the stars on the beach. With these and other poems, Whitman advances the idea that even things that may seem insignificant at first are actually important parts of the very fabric of the world. Towards the middle of "Song of Myself", Whitman devotes a section of the poem: Section 31 – to his idea of ​​"equal importance" in nature, writing that: "I believe that a leaf of grass is nothing less than the journey of the stars, and that a pismire is equally perfect, than a grain of sand and the wren's egg... And the narrowest hinge of my hand despises all machines... And a mouse is a miracle enough to make sextillion infidels reel. In these lines, Whitman argues that the smallest and most insignificant things in life – a leaf of grass, a grain of sand, his hand, a mouse – are still miracles of the world as high as the stars themselves. same. By comparing small things like these to things that are generally considered larger, more impressive, or more important, like machines, sculptures, and "parlors of heaven," Whitman is able to make his point more clearly of view and his beliefs. Few would even consider comparing a simple blackberry to the grand, magnificent parlors of heaven, and yet that is exactly what Whitman does in this section of the poem – and it is what gives his words the power to bring life to his beliefs for readers. Although this section is the most obvious example of the theme of equal importance in nature, it is certainly not the only place where the theme is conveyed in "Song of Myself". Section 15, near the beginning of the poem, is another section devoted to this theme, although it is more veiled in this section than in the one discussed previously. Most of this section is devoted to a long and vast list of ordinary, seemingly unrelated topics. people going about their daily lives: The carpenter dresses his board... Coon searchers travel the Red River regions... The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold... The floormen lay the floor, the tinsmiths tin the roof, masons cry out for mortar... At the end of the section, however, Whitman ties all of these individuals and their lives together, writing that "...These tend inward, toward me, and I have tending outward towards them, and as it must be of them more or less I am, and of these, one and all, I weave the song of myself. With this, Whitman advances the idea that each of.