Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Katz, Wendy J.

English

A Newly Discovered Whitman Poem about William Cullen Bryant

Mitchell, J. Lawrence

Another English Connection: John Cowper Powys, Walt Whitman, and Percy Ives

Erkkila, Betsy

Seery, John E., ed., A Political Companion to Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Summer/Fall 2014

Folsom, Ed

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Fall 2013/Winter 2014

Cooley, Crisman

163
RECORDED LINES FROM “AMERICA”: 
A NEW POETIC ANALYSIS
Crisman Cooley
at the end of a 1992 article in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 
entitled “Walt Whitman’s Voice,” Larry Don Griffin mentions the ex-
istence of a recording of Whitman reciting the first four lines from his 
1888 poem “America.”1 In the subsequent issue of WWQR, Ed Folsom 
discusses whether this is indeed a recording of Walt Whitman.2 Since 
then, there has been an ongoing controversy over the authenticity of this 
recording.3  I want to return to this recording and listen to it carefully 
again, not to determine authenticity but rather to employ a musical ap-
proach to poetics that will help us see what the recording might mean 
in the context of Whitman’s prosody.4 
In my analysis of the recording, I will be ignoring timbre and fo-
cusing instead on the other three characteristics of sound evident in 
the recorded voice: duration, pitch, and dynamics. Unfortunately, the 
noise of the wax cylinder drowns out sound at pianissimo (pp) making 
it impossible to hear the speaker breathe. If we could hear inhalation, 
we could discover whether or not breath in the recording is in fact a 
marker of line breaks.
Following is a musical transcription of the recording. This tran-
scription will be the basis of my musical analysis of the recording. Those 
interested in the details of my methodology can read about it elsewhere.5 
It is sufficient to indicate here that I used music editing software to load 
an .MP3 file of the recording of “America” into random access memory, 
and the complex representation of the recording in a digital sound wave 
(about thirty-five seconds in length) became the basis of the analysis. The 
notation follows practices for contemporary music. The staff has been 
stripped down to a single line without bar lines or meter to show that 
it is for the speaking voice, not for musical singing. This communicates 
that pitches will not be held (one defining difference between singing 
and everyday speech is that it is normal to hold a single pitch in sing-
ing, whereas, in everyday English speech, sustaining a note is extremely 
rare and unusual). In speech, “pitch” glides up and down freely, almost 
never remaining constant. An approximation of the pitch variation is 
transcribed using symbols for glissando and portamento—to capture 
large and small pitch variations (fig. 1).
164
One reason for producing a musical transcription of a poetic text 
is that it provides details of the prosody unavailable through any other 
approach. Whitman was the most prominent early exponent of vers libre 
in the United States; his lines were also influenced by the King James 
Bible.6  His metrical innovations have had considerable influence on the 
poetry that has followed him in the United States. In casual terms, formal 
verse may be rhymed and rhythmically patterned, blank verse unrhymed 
and rhythmically patterned, and free verse unrhymed and rhythmically 
unpatterned—or more commonly, “non-metrical.” But is free verse 
really “unpatterned”? Is it really “non-metrical”? If there are patterns, 
what are they? What is the relationship between rhythm and pitch? Or, 
more specifically, between accent and pitch? How is intonation related 
to the phrase? What are the relations between dynamics and accent? Or 
between dynamics and the phrase? We will briefly explore some of these 
questions with recourse to the transcription. 
It is immediately evident that the speaker’s recitation is not unpat-
terned. The word “America,” for example, is broken into four syllables, 
each taking precisely 0.25 seconds—what appear as eighth notes at 
the tempo of 120 quarter notes per minute. That is a pattern, however 
brief. Pitch of the word rises, then falls. Dynamics rise, then fall. All the 
tracked attributes of sound exhibit parallel patterning in this first word. 
The first phrase ends with two triplet figures: “equal daughters” 
and “equal sons.” These figures belong together. Each of the first three 
syllables of the parallel figures has duration of very nearly one-third 
of a second (three quarter notes over two beats, equal to one second). 
Like a musical motif, the figure repeats at two different pitch levels, a 
descending pattern, and two dynamic levels, again descending in paral-
lel. This is an interesting manifestation of the content plane (equality) 
on the expression plane. 
There’s one quite arresting fact evident in this first phrase: the 
speaker goes up in pitch on some unaccented syllables. This is extremely 
unusual, because there is a very high correlation between syllabic accent 
and pitch in all spoken English. In the first phrase, three out of four 
two-syllable words rise in pitch on the unaccented syllable: “centre” and 
both occurrences of “equal.” In one previous study of a contemporary 
free verse poet, the accented syllable in a word received a higher pitch 
more than 99% of the time.7 Whether this is characteristic of a dialect 
of English from another time and place, a personal idiosyncrasy, or a 
poetic affectation of the reader is difficult to say.  
The first phrase is a combination of eighth notes (0.25 seconds each) 
and triplet quarter notes (0.33 seconds each). The regularity of these in 
relation to the implied pulse of the tempo (120 quarter notes per minute) 
is complicated, however, by the spacing between the figures. After the 
word “daughters” and before the words “equal sons,” there is a pause 
165
Figure 1
166
of 0.375 seconds, notated as a dotted eighth rest. This makes the music 
rather complex at this point, and the complexity, a kind of syncopation, 
doesn’t end until the final “s” in “sons,” which is a dotted eighth note. 
Of course, it isn’t really syncopation at all. It is evident from this that 
the speaker is not feeling any pulse and therefore does not pause at an 
interval regular to the underlying tempo. Yet, despite this lack of an ex-
plicit recognition of pulse, it is remarkable how many of the syllables in 
the poem are measured quite precisely in eighth notes at an unvarying 
tempo of 120 quarter notes per minute. 
We can hear the first phrase as musically satisfying because of the 
way the intonation rises from the G2 (first syllable of “America”) up to 
A♭ (second syllable of “centre”), then falling to the F2 at the final pho-
neme of “sons.” The dynamics follow a similar rising and falling pattern. 
The timing and force of the word “All” that begins the second phrase 
is surprising, even shocking. It strikes my ear as syncopation—as the 
transcription bears out. The dynamic level is forte (f). And the way the 
speaker allows the word to hang in silence for a moment (a quarter rest 
following it), and to sink from the C to F# below, as if it were a complete 
statement in itself, adds to the drama. Close listening reveals an authority 
of enunciation throughout. The assuredness packed into the rhythmic 
surprise and intonation of this word (the first time) indicates a mastery 
and complete integration by the speaker of the text. This kind of integra-
tion is quite rare. It is most commonly heard either in unpremeditated 
speech on the street or in the work of an excellent actor. 
The expression plane of the second phrase contains further con-
tent manifest on it: the word “grown” grows in pitch and dynamic level 
from G2 to D3 and from mp to f; “ungrown” reverses the pattern in a 
palindrome of pitch and dynamics. “Young” and “old” are also a pair 
of opposing bookends, the former going from C to D, mp to f and the 
latter from D down to F# at mf decrescendo to p. 
The set of five adjectives—“strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable”—
forms a single musical phrase, starting low, rising to “enduring,” then 
settling down again at “capable.” There is an interesting contrast of words 
that rise in intonation in the middle (strong, ample, enduring) and those 
that only fall (fair, capable).  Dynamics also shape the phrase, starting at 
mf, rising to ff, and falling on the last word to mp and pp. 
The word “rich” serves both as segue to the last phrase and as dra-
matic interjection. It uses the second-highest note in the fragment (G3) 
that rises in dynamics to ff before falling off. The beginning of the last 
phrase, at “Perennial with the earth,” quickly rises to the highest note in 
the poem: an A♭4 at ff that does not drop off in pitch or dynamic level. 
This sets up the declining pitch and dynamic level that characterizes 
the last phrase. 
167
The transcription shows the speaker’s concern with elements of 
musical sound: pitch, duration, and dynamics. Of sound’s defining cat-
egories, it is only timbre that the speaker ignores in his performance. The 
other three form a rich and coherent musical tapestry: angular elegance 
of phrasing, pitch reinforcement of accents (except where noted above), 
large melodic range from E2 to A♭4 (total range of sixteen semitones), 
melodic angularity with frequent tritones, canny phrasing, dramatic 
use of rhythm and dynamics, and satisfying dynamic phrase shapes. 
The rhythms here are limited to a small number of durations that are 
remarkably consistent throughout and happen to fit easily in a tempo of 
120. This is not to suggest that the poem is metrical, only that a metrical 
structure accommodates the rhythms (but not the accents) found there. 
The recording is a masterful performance, read with authority, 
drama, and remarkable musical consistency. By focusing on subtle dis-
tinctions of sound, the transcription reveals the musical-poetic qualities of 
the fragment. A number of distinctions emerge in the poetics that begin 
to define the music of vers libre—which (as T.S. Eliot pointed out) isn’t 
new. Like Columbus in America, Whitman did not discover free verse; 
but he attracted attention to its existence. 
It is worthwhile to recall conclusions Eliot drew on the same subject, 
beginning when he says, “Any line can be divided into feet and accents” 
and ending when he says: 
And as for vers libre, we conclude that it is not defined by absence of pattern or absence 
of rhyme, for other verse is without these; that it is not defined by non-existence of 
metre, since even the worst verse can be scanned; and we conclude that the division 
between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, 
bad verse, and chaos. 8
One wonders if Eliot’s ironic tone arises from the inability of prosody 
to explain the difference between “good verse, bad verse, and chaos.” 
That situation has not changed: poets and critics still fly on instruments 
when it comes to free verse. They require unerring accuracy of intuitive 
radar, but can’t get it because performances are musically indeterminate.
The purpose of focusing on a particular performance of a text is 
to move criticism out of the realm of scholastic exercise (the text as it 
might be read) onto the fringes of science (the text as it has been read). 
The purpose of introducing subtle musical distinctions, such as pitch, 
dynamics, duration, portamento (pitch shift), real time, phrasing, par-
allelisms, pitch and dynamic palindromes, etc.—instead of relying on 
metrical feet of a stumbling prosody—is to begin to get at what makes 
good good, bad bad, and chaos chaotic. 
As we have seen from a close listening and transcription of the 
“America” recording, free verse is pulse-less. In other words, there are 
168
patterns, but not any underlying steady tempo markers. Metrical verse 
might also turn out to be pulse-less in actual practice (read out loud), 
in which case a more accurate description would be to say that free 
verse has no regularly recurring accent. Whitman’s free verse contains 
patterns in the text that can be accentuated in a masterful reading, such 
as on this recording. Hopefully the approach to poetics introduced here 
begins to untangle the complex of meanings currently obscured inside 
the term “free verse” and reveals a little more of the genius that may be 
discovered in Whitman by an excellent vocal reading. 
Santa Barbara, CA
NOTES
1 Larry Don Griffin, “Walt Whitman’s Voice,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 9 (Winter 
1992), 125-133. 
2 Ed Folsom, “The Whitman Recording,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 9 (Spring 
1992), 214-216.
3 Jim Hermanson, in “The Voice of the Poet?” (The Red Wheelbarrow, redhermwheel-
barrow.blogspot.com/2011/03/voice-of-poet.html, March 27, 2011), offers a full sum-
mary and analysis of the history of, controversy surrounding, and authenticity of the 
wax-cylinder recording.
4 The recording is available on the Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org).
5 I describe my new poetics methodology at http://www.tribd.com/new-poetics-
methodology.pdf
6 As Gay Wilson Allen said, “no book is more conspicuous in Walt Whitman’s ‘long 
foreground’ than the King James Bible”; see A Reader’s Guide to Walt Whitman (New 
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 24.
7 Actually, numerical count is 99.5% correlation of accent and pitch rise, found in 
this transcription of a Catherine Daly poem: jacketmagazine.com/40/r-daly-vauxhall-
rb-cooley.shtml.
8 T.S. Eliot, “Reflections on Vers Libre,” in To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber & 
Faber, 1978), 183-189.  


Recorded Lines from "America": A New Poetic Analysis

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Spring 2014

Brigger Kruger, Kathryn

Walt Whitman's "Who Was Swedenborg?"

166
NOTES
On the Back Cover: 
A CIRCULAR ANNOUNCING WHITMAN’S 70TH BIRTHDAY TESTI-
MONIAL DINNER
Whitman’s seventieth birthday was celebrated with a large testimonial dinner 
in Camden, New Jersey, on May 31, 1889. Whitman, in poor health, did not 
attend the dinner but did appear for the remarks afterwards and ended up stay-
ing for over two hours. In the past, WWQR has printed the program and the 
menu from that dinner along with the recipe for the main course (see Louis 
Szathmary, “The Culinary Walt Whitman,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 3 
[Fall 1985], 28-35). Horace Traubel edited an entire book devoted to the event, 
Camden’s Compliment to Walt Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1889), 
containing the addresses that were delivered that night, Whitman’s response, 
and testimonials by letter and wire from many writers, family members, and 
friends, including John Addington Symonds, William Dean Howells, John 
Greenleaf Whittier, William Morris, and Mark Twain. But few celebrities from 
the literary world were present that night in Morgan’s Hall; the idea from the 
beginning had been to create a local celebration of Camden’s most famous 
personality. In Camden’s Compliment, Traubel describes the preparations for 
the event, including the naming of a large planning committee. Traubel reports 
that “a circular, describing the purpose in view, was signed by H. L. Bonsall 
and Thomas B. Harned, and liberally issued, indistinguishably to near and re-
mote parties.” It is this circular that is reprinted on the back cover of this issue 
of WWQR, courtesy of Joel Myerson, in whose Whitman collection it resides.
—Ed Folsom


On the Back Cover: A Circular Announcing Whitman's 70th Birthday Testimonial Dinner

99
NOTES
On the Back Cover: 
A PREVIOUSLY UNRECORDED PHOTOGRAPH OF WHITMAN AT 
HIS MICKLE STREET HOME
The previously unrecorded photograph of Whitman sitting in his rocking 
chair in his Mickle Street home in Camden, New Jersey, was recently added 
to the Kendall Reed Collection.  Notes on the back of the photograph indi-
cate it was originally part of the Frank J. and Harriet Sprague Collection of 
Whitman materials.  
One of the most striking of the late photographs of Whitman, this one was 
likely taken by Frank P. Harned, the brother of Whitman’s close friend and 
one of his literary executors Thomas Harned, who took another photograph 
in the same setting and probably in the same session, circa 1887.  The known 
Harned photograph is reprinted here next to the newly discovered one.  Notice 
the covered window and curtain backdrop, as well as the identical positioning 
Figure 1 Figure 2
100
of the same objects on the shelf below the window, where, in the new photo, 
we can see one of Whitman’s omnipresent notebooks, along with his tea cup 
and his pen.  
Whitman’s only comment to Horace Traubel about Harned’s photos indi-
cated that he “has not seemed to like Frank Harned’s pictures.”  When asked 
why, Whitman responded, “I don’t know why—never do.  I have feelings about 
things, nothing more.”  (With Walt Whitman in Camden, 1:420; available on 
The Walt Whitman Archive).  Whitman may have on that occasion been talking 
about Frank Harned’s attempts to photograph Sidney Morse’s then-recently 
completed bust of Whitman, photos that Whitman found “weak, defective, 
futile,” “totally a fizzle.”  (WWWC, 5:280-281).  
Despite whatever reservations Whitman may have had about Frank 
Harned as a photographer, this newly rediscovered image of Whitman is a 
powerful one—both in the intimacy of the domestic details (including the 
just visible clutter on the floor around his rocking chair) and in the majesty of 
the poet’s head in a profile shot that anticipates the much more familiar late 
profile photos by Thomas Eakins and Samuel Murray taken the year before 
Whitman’s death.
This photo will soon be available on The Walt Whitman Archive (whitman-
archive.org), where all other known photographs of Whitman are currently 
available.
The University of Iowa                             Ed Folsom


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