Not Youth Pertains to Me
Not Youth Pertains to Me - context Summary
Composed Amid the Civil War
Whitman’s speaker dismisses youth, refinement, and learned society as irrelevant to his identity. Instead he claims solace and purpose in tending the wounded and comforting dying soldiers, activities that shape his voice. The poem explains that its songs were written during pauses in camp life, framing poetic composition as an ethical, wartime response rather than an aesthetic pursuit.
Read Complete AnalysesNOT youth pertains to me, Nor delicatesse—I cannot beguile the time with talk; Awkward in the parlor, neither a dancer nor elegant; In the learn’d coterie sitting constrain’d and still—for learning. inures not to me; Beauty, knowledge, inure not to me—yet there are two or three things inure to me; I have nourish’d the wounded, and sooth’d many a dying soldier, And at intervals, waiting, or in the midst of camp, Composed these songs.
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