The Wound Dresser By Walt Whitman Analysis

Walt Whitman captures his audience’s attention with his realism poetry and free verse poetry throughout much of his life as a poet. Whitman was a man of the civil war era and in his poem “The Wound-Dresser” shows his life experiences in the war come full force in the way he conveys his contribution in the civil war. His view of the war as a wound-dresser and he describes some of the most horrendous scenes imaginable from the eyes of an everyday man. His poem “The Wound-Dresser” doesn’t show the war from a distance, but from right on the battlefield in its unedited version as written by Whitman. The way Whitman conveys his poems of the everyday man’s life in his time-period is presented by utilizing his realism style to connect to the audience and his gruesomely descriptive vocabulary.

One way that Whitman conveys his poetry is through the eyes of the everyday man. In this period of American history, the civil war was ongoing, and his poetry did not shy away from the everyday

Whitman’s experience as a wound-dresser at the time of the war gave him a unique perspective of the men and women on the front lines. One way he shows the realism is through his free verse style that doesn’t have a rhyming pattern or many other traditional poetry rules. This gives his poetry sort of an edge that lets the realism come through. The way Whitman gets the audience’s attention in his free verse style is through repetition of words that rhyme but with no necessary order. One example of this is his use of the first-person pronoun I in “The Wound-Dresser” for example at the beginning of most stanzas Whitman starts out by saying “I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep, … I dress the perforated shoulder, … I am faithful, I do not give out” (Levine 78). This