Free Verse
Good ol' Walt Whitman is kind of the granddaddy of free verse, Shmoopers. He lets us know that too, just by having the occasional super-long line that just can't be fit into one line alone. It's so darn free that it needs to trickle off into the next line. Perhaps that's just Whitman being a bit too overzealous and longwinded, but the fact still remains that the guy revolutionized poetry in America by shunning all those stuffy, conventional rhymes and meters.
There are no couplets, no exercises in iambic pentameter, and certainly none of that singsong vibe that can get a bit tiresome after reading one too many sonnets. Nope, Whitman paves his own way with the kind of verse that reflects the grassroots of the American spirit. It's free and informal (in the sense of sounding like nineteenth-century common talk), without needing all the prescribed rhymes. It's like the speaker is talking to us directly, like these lines in Section 4:
Death's outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die.) (24-25)
The elaborate syntax and imagery is what lend the poem its poetic punch. For instance, in Section 3 we get:
With delicate-color'd blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break. (16-17)
The speaker doesn't need all the singsong rhymes to make those two lines sound like a verse taken right out of some poetic paradise. We have one beautiful adjective followed by another, that's then followed by the very poetic technique of having the subject ("I") follow the object ("A sprig"). In other words, he kind of reverses the whole subject-predicate formula (goes the cat vs. the cat goes). Hear the difference? The effect is one that propels the reader through the line. Just like the coffin that keeps showing up at the end of sections (see 5 and 6), the inverted syntax builds momentum for the reader by saving the star of the action for the end.
By using those really long lines, too, Whitman manages to tack on as many examples of figurative language and anaphora as he possibly can in order to make the poem come alive. In lieu of rhyme, he uses techniques like these to lend energy and expanse to his lines, without trapping it all in a forced meter. For example, check out Section 2:
O great star disappear'd—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul. (9-11)
By repeating that initial "O," we get the same sort of memorable feeling we might get from a rhyme, only it's not boring us to death with something like a predictable couplet. It feels a bit more honest, plainspoken, and, well, free. And for a poet who had his eye on the entirely of his country's experience, Whitman's form had to be as open and free as he could make it.