Walt Whitman
Quick answer: Walt Whitman's craft for modern poets: the long breath line, catalogue technique and direct address. Learn how Leaves of Grass reinvented free verse.
In 1855 a Brooklyn printer and journalist set the type himself for a slim book with no author's name on the title page, just a portrait of a workman with his hat cocked. The book was Leaves of Grass, and Walt Whitman spent the rest of his life revising and expanding it through edition after edition until the so-called deathbed edition of 1892. Modern free verse, in English at least, starts here.
Whitman, who lived from 1819 to 1892, invented a line long enough to hold multitudes: crowds, trades, rivers, the wounded soldiers he nursed through the Civil War. Poets keep returning to him because the techniques are learnable even when the appetite is inimitable.
The poem
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
Walt Whitman, 'Song of Myself' (1855)
The poet of the open road
Whitman worked as a printer, teacher, journalist and government clerk, and the jobs show: his poems read like a man setting the whole country in type. Emerson had called for a poet equal to America's size and mixture, and famously wrote to Whitman that Leaves of Grass was the start of a great career.
The Civil War transformed the book. Whitman spent years visiting wounded soldiers in Washington hospitals, and Drum-Taps (1865) and his great elegy for Lincoln, 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd', brought grief and tenderness into the expansive early manner. Ironically, his most popular poem in his lifetime was the conventional, rhymed 'O Captain! My Captain!', which he came to resent.
The signature moves
Whitman's free verse is not formless; it substitutes new structures for the old ones.
What you can learn from Whitman
Learn the line as breath. Draft a poem in which each line is exactly one exhalation's worth of speech, no enjambment, and feel how different the pacing logic is from metrical writing. Then build a catalogue honestly: list twenty specific people you saw this month, each with one identifying action, and arrange them so the list rises somewhere and rests somewhere. A catalogue without shape is an inventory; Whitman's always crest.
Finally, steal the address to the future. Write a passage that speaks directly to a reader fifty years from now about what you both feel in common. Sentimentality is the risk; specificity is the cure.
Where to start reading
Do not start with the whole of Leaves of Grass; start with these and let the book grow.
What poets can take from this
- Write lines the length of one spoken breath and let syntax, not metre, set the pace.
- Drive long passages with repeated openings, then break the pattern at the emotional peak.
- Build catalogues from named, specific items and shape the list to crest and rest.
- Address the future reader directly at least once and earn it with concrete shared detail.
- Revise expansively as well as reductively; some drafts need to double before they finish.
Try it yourself
Stand somewhere public for fifteen minutes and record what passes. Write a catalogue poem of at least twenty lines, one observed person or thing per line, addressed to someone reading it a century from now.
Questions
Did Walt Whitman invent free verse?
Not from nothing; biblical verse and earlier experiments preceded him. But Leaves of Grass (1855) established free verse as a serious method in English, replacing metre with breath-length lines, parallel grammar and catalogue structures that poets still use.
What is 'Song of Myself' about?
It is a long poem in which an expansive first-person speaker identifies with virtually everyone and everything in America, arguing through accumulation that self, body, nation and cosmos are continuous. It anchors Leaves of Grass in every edition.
What did Whitman do during the Civil War?
He spent years as a volunteer visitor and informal nurse in Washington's military hospitals, writing letters for wounded soldiers. The experience produced Drum-Taps (1865) and profoundly deepened his later poetry.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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