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Flashcards: Comparing conflicting or supporting ideas
Adapted from “Walt Whitman” in The Nebraska State Journal by Willa Cather (January 19, 1896)
Speaking of monuments reminds one that there is more talk about a monument to Walt Whitman, “the good, gray poet.” Just why the adjective good is always applied to Whitman it is difficult to discover, probably because people who could not understand him at all took it for granted that he meant well. If ever there was a poet who had no literary ethics at all beyond those of nature, it was he. He was neither good nor bad, any more than are the animals he continually admired and envied. He was a poet without an exclusive sense of the poetic, a man without the finer discriminations, enjoying everything with the unreasoning enthusiasm of a boy. He was the poet of the dung hill as well as of the mountains, which is admirable in theory but excruciating in verse. In the same paragraph he informs you that, “The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,” and that “The malformed limbs are tied to the table, what is removed drop horribly into a pail.” No branch of surgery is poetic, and that hopelessly prosaic word “pail” would kill a whole volume of sonnets. Whitman’s poems are reckless rhapsodies over creation in general, sometimes sublime, sometimes ridiculous. He declares that the ocean with its “imperious waves, commanding” is beautiful, and that the fly-specks on the walls are also beautiful. Such catholic taste may go in science, but in poetry their results are sad. The poet’s task is usually to select the poetic. Whitman never bothers to do that, he takes everything in the universe from fly-specks to the fixed stars. His Leaves of Grass is a sort of dictionary of the English language, and in it is the name of everything in creation set down with great reverence but without any particular connection.
But however ridiculous Whitman may be there is a primitive elemental force about him. He is so full of hardiness and of the joy of life. He looks at all nature in the delighted, admiring way in which the old Greeks and the primitive poets did. He exults so in the red blood in his body and the strength in his arms. He has such a passion for the warmth and dignity of all that is natural. He has no code but to be natural, a code that this complex world has so long outgrown. He is sensual, not after the manner of Swinburne and Gautier, who are always seeking for perverted and bizarre effects on the senses, but in the frank fashion of the old barbarians who ate and slept and married and smacked their lips over the mead horn. He is rigidly limited to the physical, things that quicken his pulses, please his eyes or delight his nostrils. There is an element of poetry in all this, but it is by no means the highest. If a joyous elephant should break forth into song, his lay would probably be very much like Whitman’s famous “Song of Myself.” It would have just about as much delicacy and deftness and discriminations. He says:
“I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied nor not one is demented with the mania of many things. Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one is respectable or unhappy, over the whole earth.” And that is not irony on nature, he means just that, life meant no more to him. He accepted the world just as it is and glorified it, the seemly and unseemly, the good and the bad. He had no conception of a difference in people or in things. All men had bodies and were alike to him, one about as good as another. To live was to fulfill all natural laws and impulses. To be comfortable was to be happy. To be happy was the ultimatum. He did not realize the existence of a conscience or a responsibility. He had no more thought of good or evil than the folks in Kipling’s Jungle Book.
And yet there is an undeniable charm about this optimistic vagabond who is made so happy by the warm sunshine and the smell of spring fields. A sort of good fellowship and whole-heartedness in every line he wrote. His veneration for things physical and material, for all that is in water or air or land, is so real that as you read him you think for the moment that you would rather like to live so if you could. For the time you half believe that a sound body and a strong arm are the greatest things in the world. Perhaps no book shows so much as Leaves of Grass that keen senses do not make a poet. When you read it you realize how spirited a thing poetry really is and how great a part spiritual perceptions play in apparently sensuous verse, if only to select the beautiful from the gross.
According to the author, how does Whitman differ from Swinburne and Gautier?
Whitman is more honest and down-to-earth than Swinburne and Gautier.
Whitman is less offensive than Swinburne and Gautier.
Whitman is more modern than Swinburne and Gautier.
Whitman is more strange and unique than Swinburne and Gautier.
Whitman is less sensual and more philosophical than Swinburne and Gautier.
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The Verbal Reasoning section of the MCAT contains 40 passage-based questions that test cognitive thinking, inference, and attention to detail. Given the section length of 60 minutes, each question is allotted roughly one minute and thirty seconds each. In contrast to the Physical and Biological Sciences sections, this section does not test a student’s background knowledge about specific scientific topics. In fact, bringing in outside knowledge often serves as a hindrance to selecting the correct response and is best avoided by using only the information presented in the passage. Varsity Tutors offers resources like free MCAT Verbal Reasoning Practice Tests to help with your self-paced study, or you may want to consider an MCAT Verbal Reasoning tutor.
There are four types of question on the test:
1.) Comprehension: These questions require you to identify the main purpose of the passage, understand the evidence used to support a claim, use context clues to determine the meaning of a quote or vocabulary word, and identify assumptions necessary to understand the passage.
2.) Evaluation: Evaluation questions ask you to determine the validity of an argument by an author. The credibility of quotes, progression of conclusions, strength of evidence, and relevance of information may all be evaluated.
3.) Application: These questions go beyond just the passage by asking you to predict results of an unrelated situation based on the information contained in the passage. Alternatively, you could be required to determine what events may have occurred prior to the events of the current passage, in order to make the passage appropriate or valid.
4.) New Information Incorporation: When a question provides additional information not contained in the passage, the question often asks you to weigh the strength of new evidence, determine if the conclusions in the passage may have changed based on the new information, or recognize potential solutions to resolving the differences between claims.
Preparation for the Verbal Reasoning section of the MCAT takes continued practice with passages. A variety of skill sets, such as passage mapping to identify the main thesis and purpose of the passage, are helpful in succeeding on the MCAT Verbal Reasoning section; however, these skill sets must be practiced extensively to be of use. Some students have trouble acclimating to the complexity of language used in the passages. If this is the case for you, you should try reading publications designed for college graduate reading levels, which often allow readers to expand their vocabularies and understand complex sentence structure. Also, you can use Varsity Tutors’ free MCAT Verbal Flaschards to determine your strengths and weaknesses regarding MCAT Verbal material. Use them to hone your reading comprehension skills and practice understanding the difficult language and answering the variety of question types that can be featured on the MCAT Verbal Section. Overall, continued exposure to complex language is the best way to prepare for the MCAT Verbal Reasoning section, and Varsity Tutors’ free MCAT resources can help you do just that. In addition to the MCAT Verbal Reasoning flashcards and MCAT Verbal Reasoning tutoring, you may also want to consider using some of our MCAT Verbal Reasoning Diagnostic Tests.
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