Walt Whitman was an American journalist, poet, and essayist. He was a humanist writer and existed in a time of transition between transcendentalism to realism; therefore, he integrated both views in his works. In American canon, Walt Whitman is among the most influential poets. In his time, his works appear to be controversial, specifically the collection of poems Leaves of Grass. For its explicit sensuality, the collection was described as obscene. For his supposed homosexuality, the life of Whitman came under inquiry.
The influence of Whitman on poetry was very strong. According to Smith Whitall Costelloe, it is impossible to understand America without studying Walt Whitman, particularly without his collection Leaves of Grass. Moreover, he has expressed his own civilization, and no student can study philosophy history without studying him. Similarly, Ezra Pound, a modernist poet, said that Whitman is not American’s poet, he is America.
A Short Biography of Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman was born on 31st May 1819 in West Hills, New York, to Louisa van Velsor and Walter Whitman. The financial status of his family was modest. Whitman’s upbringing and his parents contributed greatly to inculcate the love for America and its democracy. His parents greatly showed the love for their country by naming the younger brothers of Whitman after the name of American Heroes. In 1821, Whitman shifted with his family to Brooklyn, where his father hoped to take economic opportunities in New York City, but unfortunately, he could not succeed.
In 1830, at the age of 11, Whitman was made to leave the school to help out with households. He began working for a Brooklyn-based lawyer’s team as an office boy and finally found a job in the printing business.
Dogmatic Journalist
At the age of 17, Whitman started teaching. He worked as an educator for almost five years in several parts of Long Island. Whitman hated his profession of teaching or, more precisely, the circumstances in which he was made to work made him hate his job. In 1841, he placed his eyes in the career of journalism. He had already started his weekly journal in 1838 under the title of Long Island that ended soon. He moved back to New York City and started working on fiction writing and sustained his career as a journalist. He was appointed as the editor of Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846. He served there for almost two years.
Whitman substantiated to be an unpredictable journalist, his opinions and pen both were sharp and aligned neither with his bosses nor with his readers. He supported the property rights of women, labor issues, and immigration in his writings. He also criticized the obsession among the people of New York. The tenure of his job would be very short because of his volatile nature, and he also had a tainted reputation with various newspapers.
In 1848, Whitman moved to New Orleans and became an editor of the Crescent. Thought the stay was short, almost three months, he saw the wickedness of slavery for the first time. When he returned to Whitman, he started a new newspaper called Brooklyn Freeman. Regardless of initial challenges, it became a daily newspaper. In the succeeding year, the nation started questioning slavery, and Whitman’s own aggressiveness also elevated. Whitman also worried about the future of his country because of imposed slavery. During this time, he wrote a long book, also viewed as trailblazing poetic work about his own observation on the matter.
In 1855, Whitman self-published a collection of twelve poems Leaves of Grass. In the succeeding year, Whitman published an edition of Leaves of Grass that contained 32 poems, including “Sun-Down Poem.”
His father died in 1885, and Whitman became a man of the farmhouse. Writers like Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau, fascinated by his poems, came to meet him in Brooklyn. The dysfunction of his family inspired a need to escape home life. His brothers were alcoholics. His sister was emotionally unstable.
In 1860, Boston publishers published the third edition of Leaves of Grass. This revised version held some promise; however, the Civil War broke up and drove the publishing companies out of business.
Destitutions of the Civil War
In 1862, in search of his brother George, Whitman journeyed to Fredericksburg. George had battled for the Union and was being given medical treatment for the wounds he had received in a fight. In the next year, Whitman shifted to Washington, D.C., and started working a part-time job in the office of paymaster. He spent the rest of his time visiting the wounded soldiers of war.
This volunteer work, though, was very exhausting, it also proved to be life-changing. This propelled Whitman to return to poetry. In 1865, Whitman published Drum-Taps, a collection representing a sincere realization of war and the true meaning of war who are struggling very hard because of it. Another edition Sequel was published, which contained 18 new poems.
After World war ended, Whitman continued to visit the wounded fighter of the war in the hospital. He also met Peter Doyle, a train car conductor and a young Confederate soldier. Whitman and Doyle established a romantic bond (homosexuality was a taboo in America in Whitman’s time). In the 1860s, Whitman’s health started to disentangle, and Doyle nursed him.
In the mid-1890s, Whitman had started working as a clerk at the Indian Bureau. In 1870, he published Passage to India and Democratic Vistas, two new collections, and the fifth edition of Leaves of Grass.
In 1873, he suffered a stroke, which made him paralyzed. In the same year, his mother died in New Jersey. Whitman was weak enough to continue his job and started living with his brother George and sister-in-law Lou.
In 1882, he published an edition of the Leaves of Grass. This collection earned him great coverage and recognition. His other works also received overseas recognition. Whitman also seemed to be dissatisfied with America that emerged as a result of civil war.
Whitman died on 26th March 1892 in Camden. Till his death, he was working with his collection Leaves of Grass and extended it up to 300 poems. His last book Good-Bye, My Fancy, was published after his death.
Walt Whitman’s Writing Style
Walt Whitman has been regarded as the first great reformer in American poetry after his publication in 1885’s publication of Leaves of Grass. Certainly, insistent novelty marks a new style of Whitman in every period of his extended career. Many readers and critics find the most characteristic style of Whitman in his poems written during the period of 1885 to 1865. These poems range from “Song of Myself” to “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Even Whitman himself stated that his collection Leaves is to experiment with his language, and this experimental essence infuses into his poetry and prose both.
The prominent characteristic of his 1855 and 1856 edition of the collection of Leaves of Grass is its poetic diction. In this collection, Whitman uses rich mixture words adapted or borrowed from foreign languages, Americanisms, colloquialisms, slang expressions, and names of geographical places. For instance, in 1855’s publication “Song of Myself,” the words from foreign languages include promenaders, omnibus, esperient, embouchures, savans, vivas, amies, kosmos, accoucher, and many more. This short list of words suggests the range of stylistic choices Whitman has. His word choice ranges from borrowing to adaptation or coining his own words. Other diction elements create stylistic texture, and it can be easily be noticed in his poem “Song for Myself,” when the speaker tries to answer the question “What is grass?” asked by a child.
“Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.”
Walt Whitman blends the formal language of “uniform Hieroglyphic” with Americanism, colloquialism, and slang language to affect the democratic speaker who responds to the question of a child with an inclusive and familiar tone.
The unusual and familiar words used by Whitman exist beside a swarm of standard English words employed in surprising ways. Therefore, Whitman’s experiment served to be a process of word formation in the English language. Specifically, he used the process of conversion, suffixation, and compounding in an extraordinary way.
He produces new words by adding –ee and –er suffixes to already well-formed lexical words. Moreover, he would convert verbs into nouns and synthesize nouns from “ad hoc” relations. The outcome of such grammatical experiments is self-motivated and verbal in which subject (agent) and verbs (activities) unite.
Another remarkable trait of Whitman’s style in poetry is his long verses written in free verse. Whitman never used the traditional metrical verse of accentual syllables. He instead embraces the prose form of the English Bible. The important techniques Whitman employs in his prose form are repetition, syntactic parallelism, and cataloging. This innovation in style creates an oracular, expansive, and, more often, incantatory effect.
In the basic style and technique of Hebrew poetry, syntactic parallelism is prominent. The free verse of Whitman is also influenced by the rhythms of the Bible. More important than the parallelism, Whitman also tends to develop a pattern of coordinate clauses that extend from two to four lines. The extension was founded on the parallelism between lines and syntactic units. For example, the stanza from “Song of Myself” characterizes the coordinate syntax within and between lines, by employing the parallelism of subject and verb:
“I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.”
Another related technique is repetition in the verse of Whitman’s poetry. The techniques of repetition involve anaphora – the repetition of the same word at the start of each line, epistrophe – the repetition of the same words at the end of each line, and symploce – the combination of epistrophe and anaphora. For example, in the lines quoted above, “I” is repeated and is called anaphora. The long stanza from the poem “Song of Myself” is the proof of variety and complexity employed by Whitman.
“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells be-neathh them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stones, elder, mullein, and poke-weed.”
Anaphora is employed by the repetition of “And” at the start of each line and sets a strong rhythmical foundation; however, to create the complex texture of assertion, Whitman also employs elision, symploce, variation in syntactic structure and variation in the length of each line.
Cataloging is the third related technique employed by Whitman in his free verse. A catalog can be observed as a rhetorical repetition and parallelism in syntax. Typical, the catalog extends from the lyrical structure of two to four coordinate clauses and features parallelism of phrase and clause. It also employs the repetition of the full range of rhetorical devices.
Whitman uses catalog in the first three editions of Leaves of Grass and in the long poems such as “Song of Myself,” “Song of the Open Road,” “The Sleeper,” “Salut au Monde,” “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” In section 15, 31, and section 41 of the poem, “Song of Myself” is the best representative of the phrasal catalogs and section 31 also contains clausal catalogs.
The Last related technique to the free verse of Whitman’s poetry is the effective irregularity in the form of the stanza. When compared to the regular repetition of the stanza, marked by the regular metric and rhyme patterns, the style of Whitman characterizes the continuous irregularity in the length of the stanza.
Whitman’s stanzas incline to create units of expression that elaborate on the subject or theme that is stated in the first line of the stanza. Therefore, the length of the stanza functions as the poet’s expression of thought and has no formal necessity. Even the length of the stanza also varies; it could be one line to dozens of lines.
In the edition of Leaves of Grass published in 1860, Whitman starts showing his concern for the large units of poetic forms. He seems to be conscious of the printed format of the poems and started numbering the stanza. Moreover, in the 1867 edition, he used the section number and stanza numbers in his long poems. In the 1881 edition, he removed the stanza number but continues to use section number. The sections in the “Song of Myself” are added in the revision after the war.
In the 1860’s edition, another significant concern appears in the poetry style of Whitman. He starts organizing into “clusters,” and Whitman’s method of ordering poems continues to be in all remaining editions of Leaves of Grass. Even though in the form of clusters, poems appear to occupy a stable position, Whitman introduces a long and complicated process organizing his poems in figural, thematic, and topical clusters. He also passed his contents and titles of a particular cluster over a process of experimentation, and in many cases, the content of the poem changes altogether into a completely different arrangement.
Even though Whitman asserts that the arrangement of a cluster in the 1881 edition is the final one, the extensions that appear in the poetry after 1881 such as “Good-Bye my Fancy” and “Sands at Seventy” shows the similar method of arrangement and agitated spirit of experimentation.
Majority of readers till the twentieth century did not agree on the idea that Whitman’s poems written between 1855 and1865 have stylistic and thematic continuity. The general inclination of Whitman narrates the story of failure and decline. The three editions of Leaves of Grass published after postwar, his 1981-1982 edition, and other voluminous pros of Dramatic Vistas, Prose Works 1892, and Specimen Days are marked with Whitman’s deteriorating and physically ill life. During that time, he was also suffering from depression and artistic isolation.
Whitman’s postwar style is concerned with the tragic narratives and its implied value judgments. For example, in the postwar editions, Whitman uses archaic forms to directly address the readers more frequently than in the prewar editions of Leaves of Grass. In the poems such as “Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood,” “Passage to India,” “Proud Music of the Storm,” “The Mystic Trumpeter,” and “To a Locomotive in Winter” is abound with the words or “thou” and “thee” along with other archaic words.
The new style of address shows the Whitman emphasis on the passage of soul more than a passage to India in the poem “Passage to India.” In these poems, Whitman focuses on abstract and spiritual objects such as idealized past or democratic America; the poem seems to be nostalgic and calls the past back.
The only poem which does not fall in this category is “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The date of this poem contradicts the neatness and stylistic pattern of the contemporary poem, as well as the negative development of archaism.
The stylistic outcome of this pattern/form of address in the removal of the poet from the material and physical world that were the main focus of his poems written in 1855 to 1865. For example, in the poem “Proud Music of the Storm,” the speaker is a passive recipient of echoes and intimation of an abstract word that being a dynamic observer or active participant. Similarly, in the poem “Prayer of Columbus,” there is a dramatic monologue that resides more on abstract ideas, meditations, and memories of the speaker than any physical activity.
Last but not least, the change that occurs in postwar poetry is the “increased number of short lyrics.” It is a common observation that right from the start of the career, Whitman wrote both short and long poems. The masterpiece poem “Song on Myself” is a long poem that is more aptly described as the sequence of many short poems. However, the cluster of 1860’s edition characterizes more short poems than long poems. Likewise, the postwar edition of Leaves of Grass is the mixture of long poems and the clusters of short lyrics.
The poems written in the last decade of Whitman’s career and life appear to be short, not extended from more than twenty lines, and even less than ten lines. Whitman does not engage himself in the artistic manipulation of forms of the stanza. Moreover, the subject matter of the poems written in the past decades appears to produce an effect of irregular verse. Even though these stylistic features show the power of poetry, the long and elongated lines continue to be a part of his late poetry, as well as the characteristic technique of Whitman’s unique prose form.
The innovative experiment of Whitman with language crosses the boundary that separates prose and poetry. For many readers, the prose style of Whitman is best when it approaches his poetic style. Therefore, the preface to the 1855’s collection of Leaves of Grass is written in the same technique that way poetry is written.
Whitman also cannibalizes the preface of other poems such as the edition of 1856 and “By Blue Ontario’s Shore.” Whitman’s “Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson” published in 1856, and the preface of “The Eighteen Presidency” resembles in style and technique of the preface of 1855’s Preface. In all of these three texts, the effect of language is threatening to grow beyond the frame of sentences and paragraphs. This effect has been described by some readers as a speaker to the confines of written language.
The effect of presence or the voice speaker is observed in the postwar prose, especially in the Democratic Vistas. In his prose writing, Whitman uses syntactic parallelism, compounds to produce a complex word of expression, catalog techniques, and both active and passive speakers. The active speaker in Whitman’s prose is an individualized observer of urban America after the war, whereas the passive speaker is a retrospective, withdrawn, and general observer materialist disease of postwar America. Along with the syntactic structures, Whitman’s style in prose is also oratorical and marks similarity with his style in 1850’s publications.
Moreover, the style of Whitman in Specimen Days published in 1882 and other essays marks the reduction in scope and scale that features the poems of the last decade. However, certain wartime description and memoranda are Specimen Days preserves the stylistic expansion in his sentences. Whitman’s prose written after war receives high critical appraisal and analysis.
