17 pages • 34 minutes read
Walt WhitmanAmerica
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1888A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form
By 1888, Whitman was confident in his reinvention of poetic form. By the time he published “America,” Whitman had become the focus of cult-like admiration among America’s younger poets who made pilgrimages to Whitman’s home in Camden, New Jersey, hoping for an audience with the courageous poet who had reimagined poetry itself in a way that had become defiantly, proudly American. Whitman Societies, complete with secret handshakes and elaborate initiation rituals, met all around Manhattan. These devoted acolytes found in Whitman’s free verse and in his celebration of the spiritual dimension of the organic world an unapologetic rejection of the middle-class complacencies and soul-numbing conventions of Gilded Age America.
“America” testifies to Whitman’s restless experiment in form. The lines defy anticipated rhythms or rhyme. To create a living, organic poem that rewards recitation, the lines use comma placement to create, like a line of crafted music, dramatic pauses that would allow for the speaker to give emphasis, for instance, to each of the adjectives the poem lists to describe Americans, emphasis that could conceivably change with each recitation. Finally, Whitman’s eccentric and grammar-defying use of capitalization gifts each capitalized term—freedom, law, love, earth, mother, time—with a grand sense of cosmic importance and, in turn, reflects America’s (and Whitman’s) giddy impatience with rules.
Meter
As with all Whiteman’s open verse constructions, the meter here is conversational, resisting as it does the percussive beat of anticipated rhythm. But the meter nevertheless sets the poem relentlessly into motion, reflecting Whitman’s sense of a nation busting with expectation. The poem itself is a single, terraced sentence that actually begins with the title, which moves effortlessly into the opening line, creating a feeling of bursting energy.
Whitman, however, crafts the sentence without a verb. This allows the sentence a stately kind of kinetics, as recitation restlessly prowls and anticipates a verb that never comes, forever delaying completion and keeping the sentence, and the poem itself, open. More to the point, enjambment—that is, Whitman’s use of commas as the only end-punctation—at once provides dramatic pauses at the end of each line, but in refusing the apocalyptic end-stop of a period, maintains the steady irrepressible momentum of energy crucial to Whitman’s theme of America’s resiliency. For instance, Line 3, taken out of its context, appears nothing more than a laundry list of adjectives: “Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich.”
In recitation, however, the plethora of commas in Line 3 gives the line its movement, a deftly constructed metric patterning of alternating long, soft vowels and harsher guttural hard consonants (“capable” particularly gives the mouth a chance to set off a string of aspirant accents), all set around and against the promising drama of comma pauses. The centerpiece word—“enduring”—is a sonic challenge unto itself as it offers the sensual “n” sound that then drops into the hard growl of the “ur” and closes with the happy, chirpy ping of the “ing.” The word is by itself a metric challenge, a mini-opera, potentially different in each recitation. In this, “America” continues Whitman’s career-long revelation of the subtle music of conversational English.
Voice
The voice is at once proudly impersonal and deeply personal, at once declamatory and revelatory.
After close to 60 years refining the persona of Walt Whitman, Poet of Democracy, fashioned from the stuff of Walter Whitman—sixth-grade educated journalist, failed schoolteacher, failed housepainter, not openly gay—Walt Whitman speaks here to a nation recovered from its traumatic experience of the Civil War. This voice is the impersonal public voice that defined the national celebration of the nation’s Bicentennial, a voice aware of the public function of a poet to speak to the masses and for the masses, and to express a deep devotion to the core principles of American democracy.
Yet there is a much less assured implied personal voice. Whitman, after surviving two debilitating strokes and with a variety of pulmonary maladies that made every day, really every breath, a struggle, sees in celebrating the resiliency of his America a way for himself to achieve a degree of immortality. America is its people; Each American is part of an experiment in government that is as perennial as the Earth itself; Every American is part of this splendid organism whose individual parts may die but which maintains the integrity of endurance. This is a poem written by a man edging toward 70 at a time when life expectancy was about 50. That voice, despite of—or perhaps because of—its grandiose public tone, reveals the private voice of a dying man dreaming of immortality.
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By Walt Whitman
