Boot Soles

Walt Whitman, one of the greatest American poets, once wrote “If you want me again look for me under you boot soles.”  This is a pretty strange and abstract quote. Why would someone be under somebody else’s boot soles? Is he trying to say that he is so insignificant that we just walk above him and not notice him? That is quite impossible because he is, nonetheless, the one of greatest American poets. I think an idiom that might explain his quote is “don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his boots”. The meaning of this quote is that we shouldn’t judge a person until we think through things in their perspective and fully understand their situation. Here, Whitman is trying to say that he has tried to walk in everyone boots and to understand their points of views behind each person’s stories. Maybe this is what made him one the best poets. If he can write things in many different people’s point of view, the readers would be able to experience new perspectives when they read his poems. By looking at things in other different people’s eyes, we can learn things that we never knew of before.