A Study of Walt Whitman's Mimetic Prosody: Free-Bound and Full Circle by Doug Martin

Synopsis

Martin (English, Indiana State U.) examines the sounds of Whitman's work to better finds its sense. He explains modern and contemporary reactions to Whitman's poetry in terms of how critics understood his perception of the aural and the oral, his manipulation of prosody in his early works, in which he achieved a conscious appreciation of the spoken within the written, how sound relates to his concepts of the body and sexuality, the music that is within "War Taps," and why Whitman explored conventional metrics in his post-war poems. Martin closes with an examination of the free verse vs. conventional metric arguments that still go on long after Whitman experimented them, in hopes they will continue. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR