Work: like it or not, it's a fact of modern life. For most of us, work is something we do to pay the bills, but our pal Walt Whitman saw work as a very way of life. In "I Hear America Singing," he celebrates the idea of labor. But somewhat unexpectedly, he's not cataloguing the obviously heroic work of soldiers who fight for their country, or of doctors who save lives. In the poem, Walt valorizes the work of people who don't often get public attention: hatters, seamstresses, mechanics, and carpenters. He celebrates them and their hard, often physical labor. He celebrates the kind of hardworking peeps who don't usually make their way into poems. Walt Whitman loved the common man (and woman), and "I Hear America Singing" is chock filled Americans who are just like us.
Questions About Work
- Is there a difference between the type of work that men and women do in the poem?
- Does Whitman only acknowledge the work of manual laborers because he doesn't respect other types of workers (such as politicians or doctors)?
- What's up with all these singing workers? Are these people really singing all the time? Or is this Whitman's fantasy?
- Is Whitman's vision of workers overly-rosy? Aren't some of these jobs hard on the body and dangerous?
Chew on This
Walt Whitman didn't appreciate the white collar work of doctors, lawyers, and businessmen; that's why these workers have no place in "I Hear America Singing."
By acknowledging the work of women in "I Hear America Singing," Whitman suggests that women worked just as hard as men did in nineteenth-century America.