Walt Whitman’s Poetic Legacy: Free Verse, Democracy, and the Self

Posted on Nov 4, 2025 in Modern Philology. English

Walt Whitman: Poet of Democracy and Freedom

Walt Whitman (1819–1892), the poet of democracy and freedom, broke with the conventions of his period. He is considered a non-conformist, aligning with Transcendentalism. Born into a family of nine children on Long Island, he was influenced by his father in politics and was strongly against slavery and racism.

Leaves of Grass (1855)

Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s most important work. The volume of poetry was greeted with incomprehension for its exuberant celebration of the self and shocking sensual imagery.

The poems do not rhyme or follow standard rules for meter and line length.
Whitman promotes the use of free verse—no style restrictions exist in his work; lack of rhyme and lack of strict meter.
He prefers to show the natural cadence and pacing of language, but still achieves musicality through onomatopoeias and repetition.
He rejected traditional English poetry and used common people as protagonists of his work.
He encouraged people to choose their own path.

Context and Poetic Style

Context: The American Civil War.

Whitman’s Poetic Style

Whitman’s poetry is characterized by:

Musicality: Though he uses meter (often trochaic), it is not the most important element.
Language: Very descriptive, full of eccentricities. He employs a peculiar use of certain words, colloquialisms, regional dialects, and extensive use of lists. All these elements have an important role, trying to impact democracy. The technical terms reflect the industrialized society.
Enumerations: A listing of items or a cataloging of activities which detail the different types of people in America and all over the world.
Imagery and Symbolism: A common idea that stands for an abstract concept, often elaborated in an interior monologue.
Line Length: His poems display extended lines which do not follow the standard for line length.

Major Themes in Whitman’s Poetry

The Self: Both physical and spiritual. We can reach our soul through our body, but also others’ souls. He gave a lot of importance to sex, believing that physical contact leads to spiritual communication. He was in favor of sexual freedom. His themes place an emphasis on the importance of the individual and the importance of understanding the recognition of yourself in the wide scheme of the world.
Nature: He felt a connection with nature, believing that the cosmos holds an answer and that we are one with it.
Death and Life Cycle: Death is part of life and vice versa. Life is a cycle.
Transcendentalism: Against the Enlightenment ideas. We have to transcend the material world to reach the spiritual.
Democracy: The ruling political idea, important in the formation of the individual and the community. “Song of Myself” notes that democracy must include all individuals equally, or else it will fail.

“O Captain! My Captain!”: An Elegy for Lincoln

Publication: It was first published in 1865 in a pamphlet named Sequel to Drum-Taps.
Tribute: This poem was written as a tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the American president, whom Whitman admired.
Form: This poem is written in the form of an elegy, meaning a funeral song, to express sadness, grief, and admiration for the Captain, coupled with denial (the dream).
Structure: Three very symmetric stanzas, with a couplet in each. The repetition of “Rise up” addresses the reader and expresses the grief of the speaker, but also suggests that it is okay to grieve after the war.
Meter and Rhyme: Iambic meter (where the stress is on every second syllable), but only in the opening couplets of each stanza. The rhyme scheme is not continuous; the poem follows AABB CDED.
Speaker: The “I” represents all Americans. The narrator is in the first person.
Contrast: Grotesque contrast between death and victory.
Rhythm: The first half of lines 1 and 2, the “O Captain! My Captain!” refrain, is made up of two amphibrachs (a word or phrase that contains a stressed syllable surrounded by two unstressed syllables).
Musicality: Repetition of phrases, “fallen cold and dead” and “O Captain! My Captain!” creates musicality. These refrain lines, repeated in the first and last stanza, build a sort of tension in the poem.

Extended Metaphors

Captain: Used in the first line, representing Abraham Lincoln, who loses his life after the battle.
Voyage: Represents the Civil War. The journey is full of tests and trials, but now the ship is nearing the port, representing the timeline of the Civil War.
Ship: Represents the United States, which has undergone the Civil War.

Poetic Devices

Personification: He personified the walk of the speaker as a “mournful tread” because he cannot live without his captain. He also personified shores in line 21 where it is stated, “Exult, O shores!” as if the shores are humans and they are going to blow trumpets of victory receiving them.
Imagery: Appeals to the five senses of the readers. Visual imagery such as, “cold and dead,” “lips are pale and still,” “bleeding drops of red,” and “mournful tread.” Whitman’s choice of powerful words makes the reader visualize the death of the captain.
Alliteration: The use of /f/ in “flag is flung” and the sound of /s/ in “safe and sound.”
Symbolism of the Ship and Deck: The ship is a symbol of America itself, and Lincoln died in office while serving “on the deck,” five days after the final surrender of the South. The deck represents a position of authority. By walking the deck, Whitman’s speaker seems to be saying that because Lincoln is dead, it is up to him to further his mission of uniting America, a task he does through his democratic poetry.

“Song of Myself”: Universality and the Self

The poem begins in media res.

The Self: The poem celebrates the poet’s self, but, while the “I” is the poet himself, it is, at the same time, universalized. The poet will “sing myself,” but “what I assume you shall assume, / for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
Characters: He introduces another character: his “soul.” In this poem, the speaker and his soul are two slightly different things. The speaker tells us that his name is Walt Whitman.
Structure: Opens with an iambic pentameter line, following the opening of classic epics. He is evoking himself instead of a muse.
Form: Free verse—a poem with no regular form or meter.
Anaphora: Repetition of the initial word, adding emphasis and reinforcing the message of self-celebration.

The Symbolism of Grass

The grass is a central symbol of the cycle of life in his work. A child asked him what the grass was, and he couldn’t answer, except to guess that grass must be the symbol or “flag” of our hopeful nature. Green is the color of hope.

Divinity and Cycle: The grass is a symbol of the divinity latent in the ordinary, common life of man, and it is also a symbol of the life-death cycle. No one really dies. Even “the smallest sprout shows there is really no death.”
Metaphor: Grass seems to be like “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” In an endless cycle of life and death, grass and other plants decompose to form fertilizer for new plants to grow.
Immortality: Whitman’s speaker gives himself over to “the dirt” so that he might “grow from the grass” he loves. In this way, he makes himself immortal by surrendering to the cycle, imploring his reader: “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”
Hearing the Dead: “This grass is very dark to be from the… dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.” He can hear the corpses talking, as if they want to tell us something, and he wants to know what the dead would say if we could hear them.
Continuity: With the long sentences, he transmits the idea of continuity, not ending death. “And ceased the moment life… is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”

Democracy, Contradiction, and Universality

The poem includes narration, acting as a plot with characters and description. He talks about how he discovers the slave and welcomes him and takes care of him. Whitman, who wrote this poem a few years before the Civil War broke out, was firmly against slavery.

The Runaway Slave: He takes on the role of a man who shelters a runaway slave. A “firelock” is a weapon. This means that he is not afraid of him, he doesn’t need his gun, or it could be the other way around. It is suggestive and ambiguous.
Universality (Section 16): He embraces everything. He emphasizes this by resorting to anaphora and a list of specific American places and cities. By being concrete, he addresses these people directly. If he can get the reader to identify with him, then maybe he can get the North and South to identify with each other.
Union of Opposites (Section 17): He makes use of a lot of opposites. This is paradoxical, and he is aware of that because he wants to show how universal he is. He is the union of opposites: old and young, foolish and wise, mother and father, the average people and the elites, South and North (written just before the Civil War). “Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion, a farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, Quaker…” He identifies himself with Americans and people from very different occupations.
Rhetoric: Repetition at the end of the line (epistrophe) using “nothing.” The repetition also resembles public discussions and rhetorical tools. His thoughts are “the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands.” Himself is yourself; they are one, and with our ancestors too. The final element in common with all is nature.
Body and Soul (Section 21): He is the poet of both the body and the soul. He is a poet of pleasures and pain, and of men and women. He challenges the religious concepts of heaven and hell, saying that he has made heaven part of his present life, and that the idea of hell needs to be “retranslated.” He is not very keen on traditional Christian notions of hell and punishment.
Contradiction Embraced (Section 51): He sees the paradoxes in his works as natural components in the mysteries of the cosmos: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Whitman embraces contradiction. He is large enough to contain contradictory things.
Facing Death (Section 52): It is time to face his own death. He establishes an internal monologue with himself, asking questions that will never have an answer. The day is ending, and he wants to know who will be done with dinner to take a walk with him. “Listener up there! What have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening” (metaphor of the end of life, the evening is coming). The listener is God.
Regeneration: He wishes to become one with nature. He knows that after his death he will become grass. “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, if you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.” Metaphor. “Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.” He ends mentioning the grass, a symbol of regeneration. The first-person singular pronoun echoes the beginning, representing the cycle of life. Grass symbolizes the possibility of growth and regeneration after death, a beautiful whole composed of individuals.