Whitman’s Free Form: “What I tell I tell for precisely what it is.”

“He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains.” (14)

Walt Whitman used the Preface to Leaves of Grass to call for a new kind of poetry. He implored America to create American poetry: poetry befitting the soul of the nation, poetry that like the United States “is brawny enough and limber and full enough” (25). Whitman believed that poetry needs no extraneous ornamentation, or unnatural exaggerations. “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth” (23) and in his poetry we experience a new kind of truth. The Father of free verse, Whitman worked to eradicate the previously accepted notion that poetry required rhyme, meter, and “tricks” (19) to be considered a work of art. He asserted to his readers that “most works are most beautiful without ornament.” (19) And as a poet, Whitman promises to be honest in his words; he insisted that his audience “shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me” (14) and strives in his poetry to achieve a “perfect candor” (19) with his readers. This honesty and lack of unnecessary ornament has become synonymous with Whitman’s poetry and perhaps his “candor” is the reason he has persevered as America’s poet.

“The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” (26)

Did Walt Whitman know when he wrote Leaves of Grass that America would absorb him so fully? To Whitman, the American poet must have a spirit that “responds to his country’s spirit” (7) and he did respond to his nation’s spirit, earning himself the title of America’s poet.