Both of Whitman’s poems, “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” rely on the first person point of view—the strength of the individual voice that we, the readers, hear in the poem. But the voices are very different from one another. The voice we hear in Whitman is energetic and forceful—the punctuation we see most often is the exclamation mark—or, if there is a question mark, the question is rhetorical, and Whitman quickly answers himself. In “,” however, the questions are different: “Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” “And how should I presume?”
Describe the poet’s use of the first person point of view and its tone in these