“I contain multitudes.”

It’s difficult to overstate the impact that Walt Whitman has had on American poetry. Though not a major name in his time, he has come to be regarded as one of the forerunners of modern U.S. poetry for his groundbreaking innovations in poetic language, form, and subject matter.

Whitman sought to include more types of ordinary experience and vernacular expression than was typical in his time. His work was starkly different from that of the American mainstream poets of his time, represented by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and other Fireside poets. He eschewed rhyme and made significant changes to common types of poetic meter, and he developed new rhythms and styles based on his readings of certain books of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). One technique he would adopt and put to wide use was anaphora, the repetition of an introductory phrase, which provides a sense of unity while expanding on a list of ideas or things. Whitman’s use of anaphora to suggest commonalities between disparate sources presaged the technique’s power, not only in poetry but in politics: American leaders from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama have used anaphora in some of the most impassioned political speeches of the 20th century.

Whitman’s poetic style was highly original, and his scope was expansive and inclusive. In his “Preface to Leaves of Grass,” Whitman declared, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” America was “a teeming nation of nations,” comprised of many different kinds of persons, where to be a poet is to be “commensurate with a people.” This quotation informs all of his poetry, especially his central work, the long poem “Song of Myself”: “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” He was a poet of commonalities, truths, contradictions, and the immediate present. A poetic photographer of busy urban scenes. A poet equally of the body and of the soul. In  “Song of Myself,” Whitman uses the figure of the self (or “I”) to speak not just for himself, but for many, in an attempt to explore the unique combination of American experience in all its conflicting dimensions.

One of Whitman’s legacies include portraying human sexuality more openly, democratizing relationships between men and women, and questioning gender roles. He led other writers in the 1890s and 1900s to pursue similar issues in poetry and fiction. Throughout the 20th century, poets from diverse backgrounds have sensed a democratic inclusiveness in Whitman, even as his work continues to provoke important conversations about inclusion and exclusion, poetry and politics, in the present. To learn more, please explore our and our Whitman at 200 collection and our Whitman 101 article.

To commemorate the bicentennial of Whitman’s birthday, we partnered with the filmmakers at Manual Cinema to create a video to celebrate Whitman’s poetry and legacy.

Multitudes from Poetry Foundation on Vimeo.