In the 1840s, Emerson called for an American poet who could speak to the great beauty, ambition, diversity, and promise of America. But in 1860, the great promise of America was in jeopardy. Whitman’s “I Sit and Look Out” uses Whitman’s journalistic eye, discovering the sadness and weakness in American society. There is a static and pessimistic tone to the poem as it grapples with the sorrow and treachery of the world. The speaker claims to remain “silent” (Line 10), unable to move past the oppressive weight of such suffering. This pessimistic tone is quite different from the exuberant “barbaric yawp” found in Verse 52 of “Song of Myself,” a sentiment that burst onto the scene in 1855 when Leaves of Grass was first published (Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” 1855). The speaker in “I Sit and Look Out” has no such optimism; instead, he is trapped by what he sees, suggesting that little can change. All he can do is simply sit and observe.

But Whitman’s revolutionary approach to content and form creates observations that undercut such seeming passivity. No other American poet of the time brought in the fringes of society and made them central.