A personal reflection on why narrative matters to me One of the most poignant lessons I learned came in a second-year English seminar. While we studied a few 18th and 19th century American authors, it was our class discussion on the narrative form of each text that stood out to me the most. A particularly powerful poem has stuck with me over the years, and has ultimately transformed the way I read, write, and perceive literature. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a monumental text that revolutionized American literature. Whitman worked on Leaves of Grass for many years, and once it was published for the first time in 1855 (with a beautiful and mesmerizing preface), he continued to work on the text throughout the entirety of his career. The text, then, fused with the enigma and personality of Whitman himself, who altered and changed passages of crucial poems within Leaves of Grass as his own life changed. The notion of working on a single text for your entire lifetime and constantly changing it along the way is extremely significant, because it demonstrates the dynamic nature of poetry and the fluidity of narrative. Perhaps it is wrong of me to think ...
↧