38 pages • 1-hour read
I Hear America Singing
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Literary Devices
Form
“I Hear America Singing” tries hard not to be a poem. Structural unity slightly emerges from the repeated word “singing” and from the use of “The” in the beginnings of most of the lines like a chant. Form emerges from the gorgeously indulgent listing of occupations that sweeps the willing reader along with dizzying kinetics of lists. In addition, the jobs the poem celebrates make a pattern—land to sea, country to city, day to night, men to women—but that pattern is at best loose.
So what is the form? Because it abides no regular beat nor offers the rhyme schemes typical of poetry before Whitman, the text—can it be called a poem?—seems formless and careless. Indeed, until a generation of poets born after the trauma of World War One and seeking ways to upcycle all the inherited traditions in the arts as a way of breaking free of the burden of the past, tapped into Whitman’s reinvention of form, his poetry was dismissed as free verse, with the suggestion that it is somehow off the cuff and sloppy writing. If this is poetry, who couldn’t be a poet?
The form, however, is subtle, variable, strategic, unexpected—but hardly free. The lines, with their varying length, invite creative recitation and give the performer the opportunity to work the lines in new ways without kowtowing to expected percussive rhythms. Like jazz more than a century later (a movement that also embraced Whitman’s subtle modulations in tempo), no two performances of this piece will ever be the same. The commas offer moments of creative pause within sentences to avoid what poetry had been forcing on readers since Antiquity—read the poem, the form argues, and let the form inform the argument. If America is a revolutionary concept in glorying work that had before the American experiment been dismissed, even demonized as oppressive, how can the radical message of its spiritual value be rendered in any inherited form. The form sings as free as the workers whose energy Whitman captures.
Meter
To state the obvious, the poem abides no regular meter; that is, the regular (and reassuring) alternations between certain numbers of stressed and unstressed syllables to create the feeling of beat. To understand the complex relationship between Whitman and meter, to understand how carefully he measured each line like a line of music, using open and closed vowels to create tempo, using alliteration, and repeating consonant sounds to adjust that tempo and create a living organism, it helps to use Whitman’s own fascination with opera.
During his time in New York City in the 1840s and 1850s, Whitman loved attending opera performances from European touring companies. Although he did not speak any foreign languages, he would sit enraptured by the shimmering cascade of sung sounds, not words. He would be able to tell by the presentation of the words how the voice modulated the words he did not know, and in turn created a powerful emotional effect independent of actually knowing Italian or French. He knew by the sound of the words when the character was agitated, when the character was hurt, when the character was in love. He applies the same principle in his manipulations of meter. Each line uses sonic effects—repetition, consonances, alliteration, caesuras, enjambment—to create the feeling of meter without relying on repeating beats. The meter is subtle, ever changing, ever reacting to the thought being shared.
Take this apparently simple line: “The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing and washing” (Line 8). This is an unpleasant line by conventional poetic standards, sloppy in its metrics. Yet it is crafted to use language to create emotion: If a performer wraps their tongue around the word “delicious” in Line 8, that performer would have to slow down and relish it, which suggests the dignity and importance of women’s work. The line repeats the “ing” ending to create resonance and harmonic cooperation within the line. The multiple commas give the performer the chance to separate and articulate the work of women. The line repeats w’s, delights in the soft i sound. The line uses repetition to create the sense of how much work is done by women. This is not free verse, which sounds sloppy. It is not beat, it is tempo.
Voice
It is difficult to define the voice that speaks in the poem without sounding patronizing, even mocking. The voice is, to put it mildly, ambitious. Whitman shapes the persona of the poet who speaks of being able to hear America sing and in turn to share that varied carol as a way to enhance the life of readers who come to him for insight, direction, and even inspiration.
Under most circumstances the idea that an out-of-work journalist from Camden, New Jersey, could self-elevate to prophet and seer might seem a bit self-serving. The model Transcendentalists often used to define the voice in their works drew on what was most familiar to their American audience: Christianity, more particularly the voice of the prophet/teacher Christ. After all, the parables delivered by Christ could easily be dismissed: who is this guy, this son of a carpenter, this Nazarene, to be doling out wisdom and proclaiming himself to be divine? But that is the voice to which Whitman gifts his poet/speaker. Thus, the voice seeks to introduce a perception the reader might never have been inclined to see. Particular in its detailing, yet sweeping in its message, grounded in the immediate yet embracing wider visions, the poet/speaker here does not want the reader to sing as they work. Rather the poet/speaker seeks to share the delicious un-hearable song of a nation of sturdy, empowered individuals—“singing with their open mouths” (Line 11)—working together. I hear those carols, the voice argues, now can you?
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