America

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,