The Rhythm that Rocks Walt’s Cradle

Abstract

WALT Whitman's most beautiful, most perfectly formed poe , Out f the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, presents us with an essential question about his ever-perplexing life and career: why should Whitman, already famous, indeed notorious, for casting off the formal patterns that so long had shaped the music of English poetry?why should he now devise his own new patterns of rhythmic form? In his earliest poems Whitman had adopted the traditional forms that specify the number and position of strong and weak syllables per line and that also often employ rhyme. As it either fulfills or thwarts our expectations, this pattern of strong versus weak syllables (also usually implying long versus short) shapes an underlying rhythm, the basic current of music then thought essential to lift poems to a higher aesthetic and/or moral level. Sidney Lanier and others correctly identified this as a triple rhythm (3/8 or 3/4), though Lanier himself imposed, or at least implied, uniform time values more appropriate to actual music than to language in which such matters are always flexible and individual.