Less Is More

I like cliches. It may be because all through my childhood I listened to my mother and grandmother saying them . Every time they were going to give me what I call a life lesson it either ended or started with a cliché. This year I learned how its better if you don’t use them in your writing. While we were discussing them in class I could not help but think of one that was my grandmothers favorite: less is more. She used it for everything. Every time I asked her for adivice, if I was writing a letter she would say rember less is more, if I had made a mistake and had to apologize she would say it, even with the way I dressed, if I were to put on many bracelts, neckleses, scarfs or accessories, she would tell me.
One day I found myself at the beach, listing to the waves as they reached the shore and how the wind blew the leafes of the palm trees from side to side. There was nothing around except sand the water and the palm tress and then I thought, less is more. It was a simple landscape with nothing flashy or extraordinay but that was what made it special.
I like to think of Walt Whitmans poems as if they were the beach. They have simple words and talk about simple things. Yet they are special and Whitman adds his own specail touch. The fact that he named the book Leafes of Grass instead of blades of grass is something. Each poem is unique and yet alike, the structure changes, but in most poem he starts the sentence with the same word like in poem number 17
If they are not yours as much as mine, they are nothing, or next to nothing;

If they are not the riddle, and the untying of the riddle, they are nothing;
If they are not just as close as they are distant, they are nothing.

I am not saying that whitman’s poem are simple like vague just that compared to other poems they seem simple. This is why the cliche fits. The poems may seem simple but if you think about the title, the structure and the descriptions Whitman uses throughout all his poems, it becomes more just as the beach became more.