24 pages • 48 minutes read
As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days
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Literary Devices
Form
It is a cliché of American literary studies: Whitman changed American poetry as few other poets in nearly 400 years have. Whitman was a pioneer in pushing poetic forms into radically individual forms. No poetry before Whitman quite resembled the poetic lines he crafted, and the poetic forms of few American poets since Whitman do not reflect either the embrace of his liberating sense of formal freedom or the rejection of his innovative poetic lines.
“As I Walk” reflects Whitman’s restless career-long experiment with how a poem looks, how a poem scans, how a poem sounds. For instance, the poem freely mixes elevated diction appropriate to conventional poetry of serious intent (the “thou” construction in Line 4; the exotic vocabulary—“eclat” (Line 7), “Libertad” (Line 19), “lumine” (Line 20); the parenthetical layering of critical arguments; the word “erewhile” (Line 3) or the apostrophe word “finish’d” (Line 2) with the street vocabulary of his contemporary America, the world of ships and factories, foremen and inventions.
In addition, Whitman consistently resists sculpting lines of tight and predictable length. He could do it—his earliest poetry published before Leaves of Grass reveals his ear for percussive rhythms and predictable rhymes. He opts to free the poem into a kind of ad-libbed feeling of spontaneity that elevates conversation talk to the poetic, a rich mixture of long and then short lines, lines with breaks within, lines that move boldly and unapologetically into the next without the tidiness and predictability of conventional forms. But this is not careless construction, nor is it just Whitman’s snarky rejection of tradition (by this time, Whitman was well beyond the age of adolescent rebellion). This a calculated and deftly sculpted form—how else, Whitman argues, how else to capture the essence of America’s stunning return to industrial and economic power? Certainly, that kinetic energy could not be harnessed by any neat and tidy and predictable rhythm and rhyme form. Let the energy of the revived America create the carefully controlled chaos of this poem. Let the energy of innovation that defines America’s revival find expression in this poem. In this, the poem (as with most of Whitman’s best verses) demands—and rewards—a kind of dramatic and over-the-top recitation. With Whitman, recitation always reveals the form.
Meter
It is easy to dismiss Whitman’s metrics (as generations of accomplished [read university-educated] American poets after Whitman did) as sloppy, a reflection of Whitman’s scant education into the structures of prosody dating back to Antiquity. The job of the poet, according to this tradition, is to give sonic delight to the subject of the poem, to reward the ear by maintaining a clear pattern of beats that in turn elevates the language of the poem into a kind of predictable, anticipated music. Within that tradition, the poet crafted lines revealing a gift for sonic pleasure that actually defined what a poet was, what a poet did. The scandal of Whitman’s poetics was its unironic rejection of meter.
It has taken generations of readers of Whitman’s poetry to begin to understand his radical, innovative concept of meter—and the demands it places in readers, although given Whitman’s perception of the public role of a poet he might be more inclined to favor the word “proclaimers.” As it turns out, Whitman’s apparently careless and slapdash metrics, the result of a minimally educated journalist taking a swing at poetry, reveal an artist whose influence in creating meter reflects his love of music. In this, he brings together the sonic drama of the opera he loved and anticipates the apparently unscripted energy of jazz.
Consider Line 15: “Like a grand procession to music of distant bugles pouring, triumphantly moving, and grander heaving in sight.”
It is by any conventional measure a most careless and slapdash sort of line, unsightly in its rejection of anything that resembles elegant poetic form. It is the longest and least disciplined of the poem’s 21 lines.
Whitman would say that the line works because the subject of the line is a snaking, slinking parade line moving gorgeously, wildly down a public street. Why would the line be anything but slinking and wild? The line creates a reassuring sense of sonic proportion by playing on echoes of “grand” (Line 15); by repeating the “ing” construction; by positioning those two commas to give the line a delicate break, a sweet partial rest that will incline the proclamation of the line to dramatic emphasis (and Whitman conceived of poetry as best not read silently but declaimed publicly); the repetition of the soft vowels against the fricative consonants that in turn mimic a parade of varying instruments, percussion and woodwinds, for example, finding their way to a rich and unexpected harmony.
Whitman understood poetic form sufficient to understand its limits and its irrelevancy to an American culture that had since its genesis rejected as imprisoning every literary form brought over from Europe. This is an American poem, he argues, the subject matter is its recovery from a devastating war, that resurrection suggested by the predictable unpredictability of its twisting, sinewy form. This is metrics defined by the argument, which makes the poem organic instead of artificial. It is not sense and sound—as poetry had been for millennia—but rather sense with sound.
Voice
The premise of the opening stanza seems remarkably unremarkable: The poet, a survivor of the great Civil War, strolls along the banks of some river and observes ships passing by. But that modest premise quickly explodes outward, upward, and even inward as the poet suddenly invokes a vision far beyond such tight boundaries and in fact exposes that vision as too limiting. Within the first six lines of the poem, the speaker opens up to a vision that embraces a wide world of inventions, gadgets, factories, transportation networks, cities, and governments. We are suddenly listening not to some person but to something, a voice other than a poet strolling along a river.
Walter E. Whitman, an undistinguished New Jersey journalist with a sixth-grade education, invented Walt Whitman, American Poet. The persona, inspired in part by Whitman’s reading of the tonic, exhilarating essays of Emerson and inspired in part by his ingestion of the rhetoric of the prophets in the Old Testament, speaks from a kind of collective individual, a construction that was radical in poetry. The voice that declaims the optimistic message of “As I Walk” is no ordinary strolling poet—the vision is expansive, the reach to the horizon involves something greater than human but just short of God. This persona, without irony, without apology, assumes itself to speak grandly to its nation—trust me, the voice thunders, I see in ways that you do not, and like an Old Testament seer, I share to help lift you from your limited sense of your own moment. Not Walter Whitman, journalist, but this Walt Whitman, self-appointed prophet from Camden, the poet you did not even know you needed. The poem’s conclusion is fitting as the speaker assures the listener (not the reader, as Whitman found reading poetry to be decidedly limiting) that poets occupy a greater, grander space than inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Without the poet to infuse the world with purpose and meaning, the voice concludes, the world would be a little more than a dreary procession of stuff.
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By Walt Whitman
