All about Walt Whitman

Whitman and the present participles:

The editor of this book of essays (Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman), Ezra Greenspan, is the author of the next piece in it: “Some Remarks on the Poetics of ‘Participle-Loving Whitman’” (1997, pp.92-109), which is about the frequent use of present participles, or -ing forms, by Whitman. The critic explains that the “practice of self-consciously utilizing present participles” is unknown; however, he suggests that Whitman used present participles “because he saw the poetic act basically as one of physical and intellectual mobility” (p.94-5), and its use was his way of inserting this into the language. In the critic’s opinion, the first strophe of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” is “The best instance” of the use of present participles, which is also “one of the finest sustained pieces of verse he ever wrote” (p.95). This poem, which shows Whitman’s love for “long-flowing poetic syntax”, also shows his fondness for “delaying the appearance of the subject ‘I’ until the end of a long-flowing sequence of participial, prepositional, or clausal expressions, thus creating the context out of which his ‘I’ will be born” (p.95).  Whitman also loved doing all this with the subject (I, myself) at the beginning of verses.

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