re was very uncomfortable for him, as his native style was "free verse". He often expressed irritation (in a humorous way) that this poem succeeded so much and his other poems had not. "I'm almost sorry I ever wrote the poem" (Walt Whitman 2000), he once said, but I am sure he was grinning when he said it. Hush'd be the Camps Today! This outstanding poem reflects, from the soldier’s point of view, the grief they felt over the death of the President. This Dust Was Once the Man, his four-line poem, is one of the most powerful poems in American poetry Walt Whitman found one of his highest ideals in President Lincoln. Whitman's poem, "(1865) is an excellent poem, and one of the finest ever written about Lincoln. The images are good and the rhythm is typical of Whitman's use of free verse” (Unit Eight: The Flowering of New England 1999). Free verse is 'free' because it lacks regular meter and line length, but this places greater emphasis upon rhythm, just like a powerful speech. Whitman tried to approximate the natural sounds of common speech in his poetry, carefully varying the length of his lines according to his intended emphasis. Many other writers do not like this style, but it has become a very important style of American poetry, and Robert Frost compared it to “playing tennis without a net” (Woodress 284). Ezra Pond however, considered Whitman to be an American Poet among all other American poets. Pound comments, “He is genius because he has vision of what he is and of his function. He knows that he is a beginning and not a classically finished work” (Woodress 191). Walt Whitman is one of the most dramatic, and certainly one of the clearest, imagists in literature. His work is characterized by his commitment to the ideas of the innate worth of the individual and of democracy as the bastion of freedom. Bill Massey commends Whitman, “His break with traditional poetic ideas and style impressed...
