Lists
Whitman filled his poetry with long lists. Often a sentence
will be broken into many clauses, separated by commas, and each
clause will describe some scene, person, or object. These lists
create a sense of expansiveness in the poem, as they mirror the
growth of the United States. Also, these lists layer images atop
one another to reflect the diversity of American landscapes and
people. In “Song of Myself,” for example, the speaker lists several
adjectives to describe Walt Whitman in section 24.
The speaker uses multiple adjectives to demonstrate the complexity
of the individual: true individuals cannot be described using just
one or two words. Later in this section, the speaker also lists
the different types of voices who speak through Whitman. Lists are
another way of demonstrating democracy in action: in lists, all
items possess equal weight, and no item is more important than another
item in the list. In a democracy, all individuals possess equal
weight, and no individual is more important than another.
The Human Body
Whitman’s poetry revels in its depictions of the human
body and the body’s capacity for physical contact. The speaker of
“Song of Myself” claims that “copulation is no more rank to me than
death is” (521) to demonstrate the naturalness
of taking pleasure in the body’s physical possibilities. With physical
contact comes spiritual communion: two touching bodies form one
individual unit of togetherness. Several poems praise the bodies of
both women and men, describing them at work, at play, and interacting.
The speaker of “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855)
boldly praises the perfection of the human form and worships the
body because the body houses the soul. This free expression of sexuality
horrified some of Whitman’s early readers, and Whitman was fired
from his job at the Indian Bureau in 1865 because
the secretary of the interior found Leaves of Grass offensive.
Whitman’s unabashed praise of the male form has led many critics
to argue that he was homosexual or bisexual, but the repressive
culture of the nineteenth century prevented him from truly expressing those
feelings in his work.
Rhythm and Incantation
Many of Whitman’s poems rely on rhythm and
repetition to create a captivating, spellbinding quality of incantation.
Often, Whitman begins several lines in a row with the same word
or phrase, a literary device called anaphora. For example,
the first four lines of “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (1865)
each begin with the word when. The long lines of
such poems as “Song of Myself” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d” force readers to inhale several bits of text without pausing
for breath, and this breathlessness contributes to the incantatory
quality of the poems. Generally, the anaphora and the rhythm transform the
poems into celebratory chants, and the joyous form and structure
reflect the joyousness of the poetic content. Elsewhere, however,
the repetition and rhythm contribute to an elegiac tone, as in “O
Captain! My Captain!” This poem uses short lines and words, such
as heart and father,to
mournfully incant an elegy for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
