Chapter III: The Writer

Unless indeed, as some maintain, Whitman got the suggestion of a rhapsodical form from the once famous _Poems of Ossian_, he may be said to have invented his own ‘verse.’ These unrhymed and unmetred chants give a pleasure the degree of which is largely determined by the reader’s willingness to allow Whitman to speak in his own manner and wholly without reference to time-honored modes of poetic expression. Such receptivity of mind is indispensable.

Whitman called his rhapsodies ‘poems,’ ‘chants,’ or ‘songs’ indifferently; the last term was a favorite with him, in later editions; he has a ‘Song of the Open Road,’ a ‘Song of the Broad-Axe,’ a ‘Song for Occupations,’ a ‘Song of the Rolling Earth,’ a ‘Song of Myself,’ a ‘Song of the Exposition,’ a ‘Song of the Redwood-Tree,’ ‘Songs of Parting,’ and yet more songs. Obviously he used the word without reference to the traditional meaning. Says Whitman: ‘... it is not on _Leaves of Grass_ distinctively as _literature_, or a specimen thereof, that I feel to dwell, or advance claims. No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or æstheticism.’ Holding as he did that so long as ‘the States’ were dominated by the poetic ideals of the Old World they would stop short of first-class nationality, his own practice necessarily involved getting rid, first of all, of the forms in which poetry had hitherto found expression.

That the structure of Whitman’s rhapsodies is determined by some law cannot be questioned. After one has read these pieces many times, he will find himself instinctively expecting a certain cadence. The change of a word spoils it, the introduction of a rhyme is intolerable. They who are versed in Whitman’s style can probably detect at once a variation from his best manner. That his peculiarities in the arrangement of words are very subtile is plain from a glance at the numerous and generally unsuccessful parodies of _Leaves of Grass_. The parodists have not grasped Whitman’s secret. Merely to write in irregular lines and begin each line with a capital is to represent only the obvious and superficial side. Whitman is inimitable even in his catalogues. The ninth stanza of ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ reads like an extract from a papal anathema, but it has the Whitmanesque quality; no one can reproduce it. The imitations of Whitman are always amusing and often ingenious, but they are not, like Lewis Carroll’s ‘Three Voices,’ true parodies.

Whitman probably did not know every step of the process by which he attained his results. He was a poet who created his own laws and had no philosophy of poetic form to expound.