By comparing Victorian era poetry with the American poetry of Walt Whitman we were able to explore both the American and Victorian zeitgeist in similar eras. After I discussed how Victorian society faced a crisis of faith due to advances in science and technology, we found this loss faith evidenced explicitly in Arnold's "Dover Beach" in the metaphor of a receding sea of faith that once enveloped England. We further identified the speaker, the identity of an off stage listener, and the type of poem, lyric. While Browning's "Last Duchess" does not address a loss of faith, it does portray in a dramatic monologue a pretentious noble who objectifies women. We studied how the poet reveals the inner psychology of the speaker ,including the speaker's unregenerate confession that he ordered the death of his first wife who dared exert her own will ,although perhaps flirtatiously . We then shifted to Walt Whitman 's free verse that elevates the common American and his role in a democracy comparing it to an impassioned religious song. We discussed how form - a single sentence poem-mirrors content as each individual laborer "sings" his own song yet produces a harmonious unified "carol" . We discussed this view of American and American democracy as idealized, idyllic and optimistic by contrast to the Victorian poets.