In poem 17 Whitman talks about "thoughts of all men and in all ages and lands" (poem 17). As I read though this poem I was reminded greatly about a cliché. Not that the poem is a cliché but the thoughts he described were clichés. As Mr.Tangen says: "Writing is thinking on paper". If this is true then clichés are thoughts which aren't original, everybody knows them and they are nothing.
The first line of the poem means that everybody has these ideas. They belong to no one and thus they are close to nothing. The third line means that these thoughts don't have an underlying meaning nor are the meaning of something. The last two lines mean that these thoughts are everywhere where there are the right conditions. Even though these kinds of thoughts can germinate in every mind, one must be given a view of the world that won't allow it to fall for these apparently meaningful thoughts. Sadly, these are what the common people (at the time at least) have.
Although Whitman might not be referring to our current concept of cliché he is probably referring to the ideas of the masses that seem to have a meaning and to take you somewhere but guide you to nowhere. He is probably trying to make the point that because these ideas have no owner one should be careful of them because if they were truly so great a person would attempt to claim it. At the time education in the United States still needed more time to be at a comparable level to that of today. Due to this, these types of ideas have plenty of minds to take over and control. This poem captures the image of those ideas without an owner, meaning or even a reason to exist. Maybe, only to differentiate the truly original ideas and people that comes with them.
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