Question

Read and analyze "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" by Walt Whitman. What romantic ideas does it express, and how does the structure of the poem reinforce the meaning?
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, hear 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.

Answer 1

In this poem we can see the comparison of two points of view about one subject, in the first part of the poem, the speaker is in a lecture of an apparently very successful astronomer, where he sees charts, equations and numbers that represent many aspect of the stars, the speaker gets bored and doesn't seem to find any of this information interesting, so he goes out and sees the stars in the night sky and realizes that he doesn't need to understand all the numbers an science behind them to be able to appreciate their beauty.  

So basically the romantic ideas are that even though the astronomer  finds his/her passion in the science, to the writer, the science distracted him from the beauty of the stars themselves

The structure of the poem reinforce this idea, first by using contractions as learn'd, wander'd, the writer wants us to realize that the speaker doesn't have an educational level as high as the astronomer. Also, at the beginning of the poem, it is basically a description of the lecture told without much excitement otherwise, when the speaker goes out, the description became so much full of emotion, ex: In the mystical moist night-air..