Whitman’s main technical and stylistic features are the following ones:

• unconventional poetic structures. He did not want - and he was not able, indeed - to adapt to the demands of traditional metre and classical stanzaic forms. He was the first poet to adopt the free verse and his poetry is written in what has been called "verse paragraph" that can contain any number of lines and no readily recognizable metre. His poems are made up of sequences of verse paragraphs like that.

• The long line. His verse surprises us for its spontaneity which is a natural consequence of a long line whose syllables may vary between ten and twenty. There is no regular metre in Whitman’s poems. In spite of that, his speech-like rhythms are punctuated by a series of natural stresses (quite the same principles we find in the early Anglo-Saxon literature). Thanks to that Whitman’s poetry gets great vitality and rhythmic momentum.

• Cohesion. Whitman’s favourite rhetorical devices are: anaphora, alliteration, assonance, consonance and frequent repetitions. He uses more the participle than the finite verb. Repetitions of the same grammatical constructions (in particular of the present participles) are examples of parallelisms which provide the verse paragraph with cohesion.

• Everyday language. His use of everyday language brought critics to call it "democratic verse". There are neither figurative language, nor metaphors, nor similes and, consequently, it lacks of evocative style. His way of speaking is assertive and declarative. Whitman breaks with the poetic diction as he often borrows words from foreign languages, from science, carpentry, opera, etc., and from colloquial speech. He even invents new words.

• You and I. Whitman’s poetry is both to be performed and to be heard. All forms of the personal pronoun "I" (that is to say: me, mine, my, myself) are hugely present in his poems so that his poems deserved the title of the "poetry of the self". Nonetheless, we have to underline a pervasive use of the second person pronoun "you" – referred to his reader / listener – which intimately involves the reader in the poem and invites him / her to participate and give a personal answer. Whitman’s poetry has been called "democratic" just for the demand of direct participation of his readers and for the celebration of all and everything that surrounds the egocentric self.

Whitman’s poetry blends the public and the private, the past and the present, symbol and reality, the physical and the spiritual. It breaks with the intimate tone of traditional lyric poems. He will influence many of the future generations, e.g. E. Pound, H. Crane, W. C. Williams, A. Ginsberg.

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