Leaves of Freedom

Walt Whitman’s writing helped to capture and define the spirit of the growing United States during the challenging 1800s. He had a bold and unusual way of writing that created a new artistic style for America. Whitman's importance comes from three big changes that he led: a new way of writing poetry, a new way of thinking about democracy, and a new influence on American art.   

Whitman called himself "an American, one of the roughs, a Kosmos,”  and he carefully created this public image, which matched the bold and rebellious style of his writing. He presented himself as a "rough working man,” and this wasn't just a part of his life story. It was a key part of his art. It showed he was rejecting the old European rules for poetry to create a new, truly American style.

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity - Episode 467. Leaves of Freedom in his poems of celebration he also used and jam which is when a sentence continues onto the next line this created a feeling the old European rules for poetry to create a new truly American style    

Walt Whitman’s writing helped to capture and define the spirit of the growing United States during the challenging 1800s. He had a bold and unusual way of writing that created a new artistic style for America. Whitman's importance comes from three big changes that he led: a new way of writing poetry, a new way of thinking about democracy, and a new influence on American art.   

Whitman called himself "an American, one of the roughs, a Kosmos,”  and he carefully created this public image, which matched the bold and rebellious style of his writing. He presented himself as a "rough working man,” and this wasn't just a part of his life story. It was a key part of his art. It showed he was rejecting the old European rules for poetry to create a new, truly American style. Looking at his main work,    

Leaves of Grass, shows how his small writing techniques led to a huge cultural impact. This is why he is still such an important and influential figure in American literature.

Part I: The Stylistic Revolution: Forging the American Poetic Form

In the mid-1800s, poetry was still mostly stuck with the old rules from Europe. Poems were supposed to have a regular beat, rhyming words at the end of lines, and certain structures. Whitman changed all that with his amazing book, Leaves of Grass, which was a big break from the past. His most important contribution is being called the "father of free verse" , which shows how much he changed poetry.   

Free verse wasn't just a way of not following the rules. It was a purposeful choice to free poetry from its limits so he could express feelings and thoughts in a more natural, direct way. He avoided the regular rhythms and rhyming of older poets. Instead, he used a flexible style that sounded more like a person talking. This was a protest against strict poetry rules and a way to embrace the democratic ideas he loved. Free verse allowed him to write about big ideas like democracy, being an individual, and how all life is connected, with a sense of freedom and personal feeling.   

While some people thought free verse had no rules, a closer look shows Whitman was very skilled and deliberate in creating his new style of poetry. He used clever writing tools instead of old-fashioned rhythms to make his poems flow well. For example, he used cataloging, which is when he listed many different scenes, things, and people to show how big and diverse America is, celebrating everyone in it. 

He also used anaphora, which is repeating a phrase at the start of several lines, to create a strong, rhythmic beat, especially in his poems of celebration. He also used enjambment, which is when a sentence continues onto the next line. This created a feeling of "movement and continuity" , unlike traditional poems where each line ends a thought. 

He also used alliteration and consonance—repeating the same sound at the start or in the middle of words—to make his poems sound interesting. This shows his writing was carefully crafted, even without a rhyming pattern.

For example, in "Song of Myself, 11," he uses alliteration with the words "bathe" and "by" to make them stand out. it was a reinvention. It gave later writers a new model for how to "experiment with language, structure, and themes" in ways that were once not possible.   

Part II: Thematic and Philosophical Core: The Self, the Body, and Democracy

Whitman's stylistic innovations were inseparably linked to his groundbreaking thematic and philosophical concerns. He was profoundly influenced by the American Transcendentalist movement, particularly the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. This philosophy is a foundational element of his work, shaping his embrace of the inherent goodness of both humanity and nature. He championed the belief in the divinity within the self and the idea that spirituality could be found through personal exploration and a deep connection with nature. This conviction led him to promote a sense of self-reliance and the rejection of conformity, encouraging his readers to trust their own instincts and inner voices.   

Beyond the individual, Whitman was the quintessential poet of democracy. His poetry celebrated the "inherent worth of every individual"  and championed democratic ideals across all social strata. He intentionally broke down social hierarchies by celebrating the "common man" and elevating the experiences of working-class Americans, from farmers to mechanics, to the status of epic poetry. His vision of democracy was all-encompassing, advocating for equality across "class, race, and gender".   

In a particularly controversial move for his time, Whitman pioneered the frank and unapologetic treatment of the human body and sexuality. He challenged the era's pervasive "puritanical norms"  by celebrating the human body and physical experiences as "natural and sacred aspects of life". His use of sensual and erotic imagery was a radical act, presenting sexuality as a joyful and integral part of the human experience rather than something to be suppressed.   

This philosophical core underwent a profound transformation due to the defining event of his lifetime: the American Civil War. His initial view of democracy, as expressed in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, was characterized by an "ideal optimism". He possessed a simple, almost naive faith that the war's experience would chasten humanity, leading to a "reborn race" and a perfect world. However, his direct experience as a "wound dresser" in Washington, D.C. hospitals  exposed him to the visceral horror and suffering of a nation tearing itself apart. This lived reality shattered his earlier idealism. In works such as    

Democratic Vistas, published after the war, his conception of democracy evolved from a mystical, spiritual idealism into a more "realistic, comprehensive, and matured notion". This direct exposure to the war's "atrocities" forced him to recognize that democracy was not an assured outcome but a "dynamic process" that required continuous effort and a daily practice rooted in a society's culture and spiritual life. His worldview matured in real-time with the nation's own turmoil, demonstrating that his importance lies not just in his poetic pronouncements, but in the evolution of his philosophy in response to the American experience.   

Now Leaves of Grass is perhaps most remarkable for being an unfolding, living text rather than a static publication. Whitman continuously revised and expanded the collection throughout his life, ultimately producing nine editions between 1855 and 1892. Each new edition was a thematic reordering and expansion of his poetic vision, functioning as a "chronology of a life" and an autobiographical record of some of the most tumultuous decades in American history. The first edition of 1855 contained only 12 poems, but by the end of his life, the collection had grown to nearly four hundred. Later editions would add clusters of poems on specific themes, such as the sensual love poems in "Enfans d'Adam" and the poems of male comradeship in "Calamus," as well as works reflecting his Civil War experiences.   

The initial reception of Leaves of Grass was tumultuous and deeply controversial. Critics and readers alike were unnerved by Whitman's style and subject matter. An anonymous review from 1856, for instance, launched a series of specific, scathing attacks. The frontispiece portrait of Whitman was lambasted as the "true impersonation of his book—rough, uncouth, vulgar," a man who "scorns the delicate arts of civilisation". His verse was dismissed as being "innocent of rhythm" and resembling "the war-cry of the Red Indians". The content was condemned for its "indecencies [that] stink in the nostrils," with the reviewer going so far as to declare that the author of one page "deserves nothing so richly as the public executioner's whip". This hostility led to the book being banned multiple times for obscenity.   

Yet, this condemnation was not universal. The famous Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson privately praised the first edition as "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed". Whitman, with his characteristic audacity, used this endorsement to promote later editions without Emerson's permission, an act that effectively created the "modern book blurb". This critical endorsement from the most respected intellectual of his time helped to legitimize his otherwise controversial work.   

The legacy of Whitman's reception is defined by a deep paradox. During his lifetime, his work received little popular acclaim in the United States , facing censorship and hostility. Yet, it was favorably received in England by prominent writers like Dante Gabriel Rossetti , and post-mortem, he would be hailed as the "center of the American canon". The very "stylistic innovations" and "openness regarding sex" for which he was initially rejected  are precisely what cemented his enduring importance. His audacious break from tradition, though not celebrated by many of his contemporaries, was the necessary act that "paved the way for free verse experimentation in modernist poetry"  and shaped the direction of American literature for generations.   

Whitman's importance extends far beyond his own body of work, permeating subsequent generations of poets and artists. His innovation "legitimized the national idiom" and provided a model for a new, distinctly American form of poetic expression. The list of his literary heirs is long and distinguished.   

I think it is Interesting that Whitman's first draft of "O Captain!" is not rhymed, but rather written in free verse.

But whatever its source or style, O Captain! My Captain! has become one of the most well-known of all America poems -

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;                     

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,
 Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
 Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
 For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
 For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

Here Captain! dear father!

This arm beneath your head!

 It is some dream that on the deck,
 You’ve fallen cold and dead

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
 The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
 From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
 But I with mournful tread,
 Walk the deck my Captain lies,
 Fallen cold and dead.

 While definitely one of  Whitman’s most famous works, most scholars believe My Captain is not a very good example of the majority of Whitman’s poems. According to Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading by Kenneth Koch, Walt Whitman differed from the American poets who had written before him because most of his poems were non-metrical. He brought into poetry the heightened prose of nineteeth-century political orators and preachers, an Abraham Lincoln, and even the King James translation of the Bible.  Instead of a regular rhyming scheme, Whitman wrote like the common man spoke but in a slightly elevated sense.

Another poem by Walt Whitman that deals with the Civil War is his classic work - Come up from the fields father, 

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn,

Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder,

Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in   the moderate wind,

Where apples ripe in the orchards hang and grapes on the trellis’d vines,   

(Smell you the smell of the grapes on the vines?

Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?)

Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,   

Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful, and the farm prospers well.

Down in the fields all prospers well,

But now from the fields come father, come at the daughter’s call,

And come to the entry mother, to the front door come right away.

Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling,

She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor adjust her cap.

Open the envelope quickly,   

O this is not our son’s writing, yet his name is sign’d,

O a strange hand writes for our dear son, O stricken mother’s soul!

All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,

Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,

At present low, but will soon be better.

Ah now the single figure to me,

Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms,

Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint,

By the jamb of a door leans.

Grieve not so, dear mother, (the just-grown daughter speaks through her sobs,

The little sisters huddle around speechless and dismay’d,)

See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will soon be better.

Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor may-be needs to be better, that brave and simple soul,)

While they stand at home at the door he is dead already,

The only son is dead.

But the mother needs to be better,

She with thin form presently drest in black,

By day her meals untouch’d, then at night fitfully sleeping, often waking,

In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with one deep longing,   

O that she might withdraw unnoticed, silent from life escape and withdraw,

To follow, to seek, to be with her dear dead son.

Walt Whitman’s importance rests not only in the poetry he produced, but also in the new possibilities for poetry that he opened up. Before Whitman, American verse often felt like a polite imitation of British models. Rhyme and meter were carefully maintained, and poets tended to write in a cultivated style that would not have looked out of place in London drawing rooms. Whitman shattered those conventions in Leaves of Grass. His free verse lines stretched across the page like long breaths, unconfined by regular rhyme or rhythm. He spoke in the cadences of ordinary American speech, yet infused them with grandeur and spiritual intensity. In doing so, he liberated poetry from strict formality and showed that it could contain the full sprawl of American life.

More than just a technical innovator, Whitman carried a new vision of what poetry should do. He saw himself as a democratic poet, a voice for every worker, soldier, mother, and farmer. The carpenter and the fisherman were as worthy of poetic celebration as the president or the general. In this sense Whitman’s poems are a vast chorus, where no one voice is higher than another. When he declared, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he was not simply speaking about himself but also about the country and the human condition. His poetry makes the claim that to sing the self is to sing the world, and that a true American poetry must embrace the whole nation, in all its contradictions and diversity.

This expansive sense of self also made Whitman the poet of individuality. He placed the “I” at the center of his work, not in a confessional sense, but as a kind of universal self in which readers could find themselves reflected. This bold declaration of the poet’s identity and body was radical in its time. The Victorians often turned away from such intimacy and candor, but Whitman wrote openly about desire, the body, and the soul’s union with the natural world. He made poetry a place where private experience could merge with public meaning.

Whitman’s influence has been immense. Emily Dickinson, writing at nearly the same time, chose a different path—short, compact poems rather than sweeping catalogs—but her decision to break away from inherited forms parallels Whitman’s. Together they stand as the twin founders of a truly American poetry. The modernists who followed—Pound, Eliot, Williams—looked back to Whitman’s example of free verse, even when they tried to refine or overturn it. Langston Hughes carried Whitman’s democratic impulse into the Harlem Renaissance, celebrating working-class Black life with the same dignity Whitman once gave to the farmers and mechanics of the nineteenth century.

Perhaps the most direct heir is Allen Ginsberg, who openly declared Whitman his teacher and guide. Ginsberg’s Howl, with its long lines and urgent voice, can be read as a twentieth-century echo of Whitman’s Song of Myself. The sense of poetry as prophecy, as testimony, as a call to the reader—these are all Whitman’s gifts, passed on across the generations. Even today, poets such as Mary Oliver or Joy Harjo inherit his attentiveness to nature, his reverence for the ordinary, and his insistence that poetry must speak to the widest possible community.

For these reasons, Whitman remains essential. Every time a poet turns away from rigid forms and writes in free verse, Whitman is present. Every time a poem addresses the reader directly, inviting them into the experience, Whitman’s voice can be heard. And every time a writer insists that the everyday lives of ordinary people are worth singing, Whitman’s spirit is close at hand. He was not only the author of Leaves of Grass; he was the author of a new way of thinking about poetry itself. His work continues to remind us that poetry can be as large and as various as life itself, and that the poet’s task is to give voice to the multitude of human experience.

Walt Whitman matters because he gave poetry a new voice—bold, democratic, and unafraid of the ordinary. With Leaves of Grass he broke the old rules of rhyme and meter, creating free verse that could hold the rhythms of everyday American speech. He celebrated both the individual and the multitude, insisting that the lives of common people deserved as much attention as those of presidents. Whenever poetry turns expansive, intimate, and inclusive, Whitman’s spirit is there, reminding us that the poet’s task is to sing the whole of human life.

Whitman gave us poetry not bound to the page but breathing with the pulse of life itself, and every poet who dares to sing freely is still keeping time with his great, unending song.  In the end, Whitman’s greatest gift was to prove that poetry belongs to everyone, and that the stories of ordinary people are as worthy of song as the stories of kings. Without Whitman, American poetry would have had no true beginning; with him, it found its endless horizon.” And  “Whitman’s voice reminds us that poetry, at its best, does not divide but gathers—bringing together body and soul, self and nation, reader and writer—into one vast, ongoing conversation.”

Sources include: leaves of grass death be edition by Walt Whitman, the new Walt Whitman handbook bye gay Wilson Allen, Walt whitman the making of the poet by Paul ZWEIG, and from noon to starry night a life of Walt Whitman bye Philip callow.

The subject of the following episode is the Russian writer, Fydor Dostoyevsky of the same time period. And while Whitman was writing Leaves of Grass in America, Dostoevsky was sitting in Siberian exile, sketching the outlines of novels that would change world literature. Both men were witnesses to the upheavals of the nineteenth century, but their visions diverged: one celebrated possibility, the other exposed the cost of freedom.”

Sources include: leaves of grass death be edition by Walt Whitman, the new Walt Whitman handbook by Gay Wilson Allen, Walt Whitman by Paul Zweig, and from Noon to Starry NIght by Phillip Callow

The subject of the following episode is the Russian writer, Fydor Dostoyevsky of the same time period. And while Whitman was writing Leaves of Grass in America, Dostoevsky was sitting in Siberian exile, sketching the outlines of novels that would change world literature. Both men were witnesses to the upheavals of the nineteenth century, but their visions diverged: one celebrated possibility, the other exposed the cost of freedom.”

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