Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination

In this poem, simply titled “A Noiseless, Patient Spider,” Whitman’s speaker makes an analogy between his soul and a spider starting the difficult process of building its web.2 The spider stands “isolated” on a “promontory,” a lonely individual seeking to make connections. Whitman’s diction suggests that we might even think of the spider as a figure for the nineteenth-century American pioneer, who sets out to explore what Whitman and his contemporaries conceived of as the “vast” and “vacant” continent of North America. In the second stanza, the speaker adds language that evokes nineteenth-century immigration to America as the speaker imagines his soul surrounded by “measureless oceans of space.”