Walt Whitman
American · 19th century
American poet whose magnum opus Leaves of Grass, continually expanded from 1855 to 1891, is considered one of the foundational works of American poetry.
Connection to Taylor Swift
An American poet whose expansive free verse and use of epiphora Uncle Jerry offers as a possible touchstone for Taylor's repetition-driven choruses, raised tentatively as a parallel rather than a confirmed influence.
Notable Works
- Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself, O Captain! My Captain!, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Appears in the Archive
Context within the Archive
Song of Myself
“I used to scream ferociously Any time I wanted I, I”
Surfaced by a community reader who hears Whitman's barbaric yawp behind the bare pronoun that closes the second verse. The argument is that the "I" is not a stalled sentence but a substitution: the child's identity and the child's noise were the same thing, so the pronoun stands in for the sound rather than introducing it. Whitman makes the same claim in the same grammar - the untamed self declared through a cry that language does not translate. It sharpens what the poem means by civility, since the adult can produce the sound only by singing it.