It is a cliché of American literary studies: Whitman changed American poetry as few other poets in nearly 400 years have. Whitman was a pioneer in pushing poetic forms into radically individual forms. No poetry before Whitman quite resembled the poetic lines he crafted, and the poetic forms of few American poets since Whitman do not reflect either the embrace of his liberating sense of formal freedom or the rejection of his innovative poetic lines.

“As I Walk” reflects Whitman’s restless career-long experiment with how a poem looks, how a poem scans, how a poem sounds. For instance, the poem freely mixes elevated diction appropriate to conventional poetry of serious intent (the “thou” construction in Line 4; the exotic vocabulary—“eclat” (Line 7), “Libertad” (Line 19), “lumine” (Line 20); the parenthetical layering of critical arguments; the word “erewhile” (Line 3) or the apostrophe word “finish’d” (Line 2) with the street vocabulary of his contemporary America, the world of ships and factories, foremen and inventions.

In addition, Whitman consistently resists sculpting lines of tight and predictable length. He could do it—his earliest poetry published before Leaves of Grass reveals his ear for percussive rhythms and predictable rhymes.