How Does Walt Whitman's Poetry Affect The Works Of A Poet?

Iambic tetrameter quatrains, with rhymed second and fourth lines form the bulk of Whitman’s poetry published between1838 and 1850. While the diction in the earliest poems was conventional, some later poems were experiments in blending the poetic and the vernacular. “With very little warning, then, the I855 Leaves marks an abrupt departure from Whitman's previous style and an absolute discontinuity with the traditions of English verse” (Warren, “Reading Whitman's Postwar Poetry” 46). Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, when he was thirty six years old. The appearance of Leaves was the central event of the poet’s life, both figuratively and literally. Free verse was not invented by Whitman; the poetic style he used in Leaves is the verse

The poet himself supervised their printing in Brooklyn, and had them published “as a broad quarto with a green jacket on which was embossed Leaves of Grass in gold letters. The book was unlike any poetry volume that had ever appeared in America” (11). “Its title page included the title but not the author’s name, in lieu of which appeared an engraving of the casually dressed Whitman, looking like a grizzled worker who expression and posture radiated relaxed confidence and subtle sensuality” (12). “‘Grass’ was a slang term among printers for throw-away print samples that they wrote themselves. ‘Leaves’ referred to pages, of course, but also to bundles of paper” (Killingsworth, The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman 5). The first poem that is also the longest would be titled “Song of Myself” and the introduction would later be called a Preface. The two texts described what Whitman thought “America was and would become. He established a FREE VERSE style that still reverberates in poetry throughout the Western world, and, without preaching or condescension, he also established a tone for democracy that lasted for more than a hundred years” (Oliver 3). Whitman in Leaves surpassed the traditional metrical systems and regular patterns of rhyme. This “dramatically altered the history of poetry in English and made Walt Whitman the most famous and influential poet