3.9 Passages from Leaves of Grass
3.9 Passages from Leaves of Grass
Thus, we shall begin now to quote some passages from Leaves of Grass, reminding ourselves and the reader of Whitman’s “abrupt departure” from traditional poetic forms. Even though we have brought here examples of creative literary works by Fitzgerald, Joyce and Dickinson, in terms of specific poetic invention we have to say that Whitman’s poetry takes a slightly different path, which is that of re-modeling traditional prosody and forms. What we mean is that, like him, we first learned how to write and translate poetry in the traditional way, and only after we had repeated exercises in this field, we started to work on the free verses of Leaves of Grass. So the kind of poetry shown earlier especially Fitzgerald’s and Joyce’s is not a common feature of the Leaves.
