How can an author portray the essence of an ideal democracy, its feel of equality, unity, and limitless potential of its people, through style? Whitman’s poetic form in “Song of Myself” reflects a poetic style that explodes “conventional patterns of rhyme and meter, freeing the poetic line to follow the organic rhythms of feeling and voice” (Reynolds Historical Guide 5). Whitman took American literature away from European styles departing from other American poets who could not envision a literary form beyond the English tradition and created a uniquely American form of literary writing.
Whitman wanted his unique literary form to reflect the new democratic society being established in the 1800s. Whitman eschewed polished English poetry with reliance upon similes and metaphors. He wanted to take America literature into a new era by diminishing European influence and revealing the nature of the new continent: “His innovative technique reflects his rejection of the aristocratic past and its conventional poetic form and his advocacy for freedom of the human soul.
Free verse provides the sense of innovation inherent in a democracy. New forms express a new sense of artistic beauty; the artistic beauty appropriate for a new world and a democracy” (Price Tradition 15). In particular, he wanted to mirror a true democratic society of individuals coming together in an egalitarian unity not only through his words, but also through his style.
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“Song of Myself’ is the first poem in Whitman’s self-published, Leaves of Grass, and represents Whitman’s prose and poetic style. The poem lacks the metrical patterns found in traditional poetry, but the lines come together in a stanza-like form. In this essay I focus upon Whitman’s portrayal of verbal texture deriving from his diction, sentence structure, and cataloguing (Griffith 159) and how Whitman uses these in “Song of Myself” to affect a feel of a democratic utopia.
Whitman described Leaves of Grass as “only a language experiment” (qtd in The Walt Whitman Archive). To begin looking at Whitman’s “language experiment” I begin by looking at his sentence structure. Whitman settled on simplistic sentences. For example,
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.
The words are simple; the sentence structure is straightforward–readers can readily understand meaning. Whitman makes the poem accessible to all people providing Whitman with a means by which he can get his message of the utopian democracy to society at large. The sentences, often divided by commas instead of periods, include only one clause. Separating sentences by commas instead of periods creates a more softens the divide between the actions and thoughts evoking the feel of unity. He varies the way he presents his ideas in this passage.
The two sentences in the first line start with action verbs followed by an adverbial making a rhythm in the first line through repetitive sentence structure. In the next line he inverts the typical subject, verb, direct object sentence by beginning with the direct object, then the verb, followed by a series of nouns and noun phrases producing another kind of rhythm. In the first sentence he invites the reader to relax and in the second and third line, the effect of the inversion results in kind of singing tone, almost as if he is humming his message. Furthermore, Whitman puts emphasis on the reader rather than himself by moving the pronoun “I” to middle of the sentences.
One may juxtapose the focus on you the reader with the opening of “Song of Myself.” In the opening of the poem he uses a different sentence structure focusing on the self:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
These sentences include clauses and subclauses. In a sense, by evoking a duality in the sentences, Whitman shows the duality of the self to the whole of society. The dependence of one part of a sentence, upon another as in “I celebrate myself” with its dependent clause “and sing myself” reflects the dependence of the individual to the whole. The utopian democracy consists of the independent individuals living together as one—like in the sentence. The second sentence further emphasizes this dependence. “[Y}ou shall assume” may be an independent clause, but in this sentence, to understand the message, “you shall assume” depends on the first part, “And what I assume.” These two clauses depend so much upon each other for understanding that one may consider them two dependent clauses making one independent clause. What Whitman does in his sentence structure is mirror the qualities of a utopian democratic structure, as he imagines it: the parts work together to create the whole
Whitman also employs cataloguing “as a great leveling device” (Reed 27). Cataloguing creates a sense of diversity and individuality. Through cataloguing, Whitman shows the essence of people, places, and things: “The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass/The young fellow drives the express-wagon” (394). Whitman captures an essence of these workers: the machinist’s beefy arms; the policeman’s relaxed gait perhaps swinging a nightstick; the gate-keeper’s methodical precision; the young man’s eager forward leaning perch. Even more, Whitman emphasizes the imagery by consistent repetition of the sentence structure: subject, verb, direct object.
Throughout the poem, Whitman cleverly takes the cataloguing of seemingly endless, unorganized, unstructured items that he has grammatically structured in such a way that he can join, as in this list of adverbials that he joins with alliteration, consonance, assonance, internal rhymes, and anaphora: “Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks,/Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie,/Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near” (411). He creates “an actual whole from the diversity of America” through imagery deriving from adverbials. Thereby Whitman uses cataloguing to help shape his message of unity of multitudes: “The language, the words themselves, become a living reality” (Reed 28).
The subtleness of the diction, the structuring of his sentences, and the seemingly unorganized listing made his style seem strange. Initial reviews of Leaves of Grass sounded the irregularities: “neither in rhyme nor blank verse, but in a sort of excited prose broken into lines without any attempt at measure of regularity” (Norton 19); and “we have found it impossible to convey any, even the most faint idea of its style and contents, and of our disgust and detestation of them, without employing language that cannot be pleasing to ears polite” (Griswold 26) . These criticisms represent typical reactions to Whitman’s innovative style because readers were accustomed to poems with rhyme and meter and without them, they did not consider the poem poetry.
Yet one may assess that strangeness of the new style may help relate the new democratic environment: the newness of the style parallels the newness of the social system and produces an equalizing effect by disorienting readers providing a sense of humility to bring readers on equal grounding. “I believe that Whitman means to teach the lesson that if we are poetically persuaded of this strangeness, we will grow more in mutual recognition, in democratic acceptance” (Kateb 549). Interestingly, Whitman achieves his objective through manipulation of simplistic grammatical structuring.
Whitman’s lead in innovation dispenses with poetic tradition for a new poetic form to connect with readers to help them realize higher democratic ideals. And though his form was not understandable during his time, it has persisted and become part of the American consciousness so much so that his form is preferred by modern American poets: “One should simply observe that the twentieth-century American long poem, with its fracturing of narrative and of traditional meter…derives as clearly from “Song of Myself” as all previous European epic derives from Homer. And when we turn, as poets, to the state of the nation and our common life, the ghost of Whitman turns with us” (Ostricker 221).
