惠特曼诗歌特点

惠特曼诗歌特点

Whitman's poetic style is marked, first of all, by the use of the poetic "I." Whitman becomes all those people in his poems and yet still remains "Walt Whitman", hence a discovery of the self in the other with such an identification. In such a manner, Whitman invites his readers to participate in the process of sympathetic identification.

(2) Whitman is also radically innovative in terms of the form of his poetry. He adopted "free verse," that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. A looser and more open-ended syntactical structure is frequently favored. Lines and sentences of different lengths are left lying side by side just as things are, undisturbed and separate. There are few compound sentences to draw objects and experiences into a system of hierarchy.

Whitman was the first American to use free verse extensively. By means of "free verse," Whitman turned the poem into an open field, an area of vital possibility where the reader can allow his own imagination to play.

3) Whitman is conversational and casual, in the fluid, expansive, and unstructured style of talking. However, there is a strong sense of the poems being rhythmical. The reader can feel the rhythm of Whitman's thought and cadences of his feeling. Parallelism and phonetic recurrence at the beginning of the lines also contribute to the musicality of his poems.

(4) Whitman's language

relatively simple and even rather crude.

(a) Most of the pictures he painted with words are honest, undistorted images of different aspects of America of the day. They are unconventional in the way they break down the social division based on religion, gender, class, and race. One of the most often-used methods in Whitman's poems is to make colors and images fleet past the mind's eye of the reader.

b) strong tendency to use oral English.

(c) Whitman's vocabulary is amazing: powerful, colorful, as well as rarely-used words, words of foreign origin and sometimes even wrong words.

Walt Whitman has proved a great figure in the literary history of the United States because he embodies a new ideal, a new world and a new life-style, and his influence over the following generations is significant and incredible.

Whitman 诗歌主题

optimistic expectation

enthusiasm about new things and new epoch.

The abundance of themes in his poetry voices freshness.

(1) He shows concern for the whole hard-working people and the burgeoning life of cities.

(2) He advocates the realization of the individual value. Most of the poems in Leaves of Grass sing of the "en-masse" and the self as well.

(3) Pursuit of love and happiness

Sexual love

The individual person and his desires.

(4) Some of Whitman's poems are politically committed: