Analyzing Knowledge and Experience in Whitman's Poetry

Read the following poem carefully:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams,

To add, divide, and measure them;

When I sitting heard the astronomer,

Where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

In this poem, Walt Whitman explores the relationship between scientific knowledge and personal experience. Write an essay in which you analyze how Whitman uses the contrast between the learned astronomer and his own response to the stars to convey deeper meanings about knowledge and appreciation of the universe. Support your analysis with evidence from the text.