Walt Whitman Essay

One of Whitman’s most significant innovation was his break with traditional poetic form. European forms did not suit the democratic country. Traditional formal conventions such as rhyme and meter could only constrain the literary imagination. He wrote his poems in free verse, a poetic form without rhyme and meter. “Pictures” was the earliest instance of Whitman’s new poetic form. The poem was written in lines of different lengths—from “a dozen to over 50 words, and the length is determined by the idea or image conveyed rather than by a formal device” (Warren, “Style” 378). He forgets about the arbitrary limits of traditional versification concerning syllable number, stress pattern, or number of lines. “He all but invented free verse in English, introducing breathlessly long lines and using repetition of words and sounds to create a web-like form to replace the conventional meters

He used tetrameter, trimeter, dimeter, and monometer in a single poem. His works had lines of varying lengths. The innovative poet were experimenting with meter; therefore reinforcing it. But, Whitman put meter aside. He used the Book of Psalms and prophetic books as models for his free verse (22). “The freedom that America gives its citizens should be reflected in a freedom for its writers to write about what they want in any manner that they want” (Casale 41). Even though “the very freedom of his style merged comfortably with the ‘meaning’ of his poems, especially those poems that spoke to American democracy” (Oliver 130), his free verse shocked the readers of the first edition of Leaves, who were habituated to the rhyme and rhythm of American poetry popular in mid-19th century. According to Rorem Whitman’s style is a kind of “lack of style: an unprecedented freedom that, with its built-in void of formal versified variety, offers unlimited potential for musical variety” (qtd. in Rugoff