Whitman and His Peers

“The Village Blacksmith”

Content/Thematic concerns: We see, as in Whitman, the sympathetic depiction of the working man as a fit subject for poetry. “He owes not any man” evokes Wilt's sensibilities of freedom. The subject of the poem also experiences the divine, as he possibly experiences a transcendental moment at church.

Formal characteristics: the form of this poem is in a regular prosody (with slight variations) form, the ballad, with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter. This is repeated 3 times per stanza and the rhyme scheme is abcbdb. Obviously this poem is more highly-wrought and metrically regular than what we've read from Whitman. However, many of Whitman's concerns have been historically subjects deployed in the ballad form.

Oakes-Smith (An Incident); The natural theme evokes Whitman; the speaker of the poem is content to grant the eagle alone its sublime views of nature, preferring instead to remain aground with the rest of humanity and wingless creatures. This poem is much more pedantic than Whitman, and the argument of the poem is not as easily divined as in Whitman's work, especially in lines 3-5. Another highly-wrought poem, a Shakespearean sonnet. Stylistically, this is foreign to the prosody/form of Whitman.

Lynch (An Imitation); This poem is in iambic trimeter, and evokes the English Romantic poets: precise meter; poet as visionary experiencing something sublime (the sublimity of nature for example; large mountains, a tempest), a dream-vision; appropriating myth, irrational, emotive. Unlike Whitman, this poem has a linear narrative sequence, and contains much more action. There is something of a refrain of “Excelsior,” yet in lines of Whitman we've read so far, the refrains are generally thematic and less explicit. The end of the poem alludes to a synthesis of you-and-i, a recurring trope in Whitman.