Exploring Walt Whitman's Poetry Styles - Essay Sample

Introduction

Walt Whitman was a great innovator of American poetry. The innovation marks his poetry style throughout the long writing career. In his works, Whitman incorporated the views of realism, as well as transcendentalism, which made him an influential poet in the canon of America. His influence is still strong, even in contemporary America. As such, it would be essential to explore the poetry styles that Whitman employed in his poetic works.

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One of the styles of Whitman's poetry is the use of poetic diction in which the poet uses a mixture of words that he borrows and adapts from foreign languages, names of geographical places, expressions of slang and colloquialisms. For instance, in his work, Song of Myself, Whitman borrows various foreign words such as omnibus, kosmos, debouch, experient, amies, and savans (Omidsalar et al. 12). The words suggest various stylistic choices that range from accepted borrowing to coining of the words. In the aspect of elements of diction, even though the language used by the poet is more formal, he combines it with slang and Americanisms to depict that he is a democratic speaker by responding to questions inclusively (Raz 15). Whitman uses exotic words alongside various Standard English words in ways that grammatically surprise. In essence, the formation of words in English is a resource that the poet uses in his poetic writings.

Precisely, Whitman employs conversion, compounding, and suffixation remarkably. He converts verbs to form nouns and synthesizes compounds that emanate from temporary relations. Based on the grammatical experiments, the verbal style used is dynamic. Whitman does not recognize the syllabic verse metrical tradition but rather adopts the English Bible prosody (Karbiener 202). In the prosody, some of the fundamental techniques used by the poet include cataloging, repetition, as well as syntactic parallelism. When these three innovations of style combine, they bring forth an oracular and expansive effect. In syntactic parallelism, Whitman ensures that coordinate clauses are in a sequence such as from two to four lines depending on the parallelism that exists between syntactic units in lines.

Additionally, the technique of repetition is evident in Whitman's poetry. Repetition may be in three forms. The first one is anaphora that entails the case in which the same word is repeated at the begin beginning of lines. Epistrophe encompasses the repletion of similar words at the end of lines. However, when repetition occurs both at the end and beginning of lines, the type of repletion is referred to as symploce (Karbiener 204). Whitman uses complex and various repetitions in his work Song of Myself. For example, in a lengthier stanza of the poem, the word and is repeated as the lines begin. The repetition sets a rhythmical frame, which is firmly based on the technique of anaphora.

The poet also embraces symploce, variations in the length of lines, and syntactic structure to enhance complex assertion. Another poetry technique that is evident in the works of Whitman is cataloging. In this technique, rhetorical repetition and the element of syntactic parallelism are synthesized. The catalog is seen to expand beyond rhythmical frames of between two and four coordinate clauses (Raz 18). Through the catalog, the poet adopts clause and phrase parallelism, and rhetorical repetition devices. Some of Whitman's poems in which cataloging is used include Song of Myself, Song of the Open Road, The Sleepers, and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.

In Whitman's poetry, section 15 of Song of Myself has a clausal catalog, while section 41 has a phrasal catalog (Karbiener 2015). Another poetry element that Whitman incorporates in his work involves the use of irregular stanzas. He persistently uses stanzas with varying lengths, thereby showing some sense of irregularity of the stanzas. However, the poet uses such a form of stanzas to express and elaborate on a given figure or theme, which is introduced in the first line. Therefore, the length of each stanza depends on the expressive thought of the poet.

Whitman also organized his poetic works into special groups known as clusters. Although the position that the poems occupy in a particular cluster is stable, Whitman arranges and rearranges the poems to form thematic, topical, and figural clusters. The cluster contents and titles undergo constant experimentation, and in a range of circumstances, the cluster would disappear, and its contents are dispersed to form another arrangement (Omidsalar et al. 23). His poems are written in prose form and uses unusual imagery and symbolism. These consist of debris, straw tufts, and rotting grass leaves. For example, in Song of Myself, he narrates in first-person to emphasize that the society and the narrator have a symbiotic relationship (Raz 21). The innovative experimentation of Whitman with language goes beyond the permeable boundaries that separate poetic works from prose. The language threatens to expand beyond paragraph and sentence borders, which occurs since the voice of the narrator resists any confines of written language.

In his poetry, it is evident that Whitman's use of cataloging, syntactic parallelisms, and compounds was aimed at creating a complex, eloquent figure. The techniques also ensure that the speaker is active as an individualized observer of America during the post-war period (Karbiener 206). Based on the syntactic structures, the style that Whitman employs recognizes the oratorical technique that was used traditionally. Throughout Whitman's poetic works, he shows praise for an individual and asserts that for democracy to prevail in a nation, equal and unique individuals ought to be unified. The innovative styles and techniques of poetry enabled Whitman to break poetic boundaries that had restricted freedom.

Works Cited

Karbiener, Karen. "Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary. Introduction and Commentary by Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill [review]." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 35, no. 2, 2017, pp. 201-206. https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2278

Omidsalar, Alejandro, et al. "Walt Whitman's Poetry Reprints and the Study of Nineteenth-Century Literary Circulation." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1-44. https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2266

Raz, Yosefa. "Untuning Walt Whitman's Prophetic Voice." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1-26. https://doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2303