earliest practitioners. As M. H. Abrams notes in
A Glossary of Literary Terms, Whitman ‘‘startled
the literary world... by using lines of variable
length which depended for their rhythmic effect
on cadenced units and on the repetition, balance,
and variation of words, phrases, clauses, and
lines, instead of on recurrent metric feet.’’ In ‘‘A
Noiseless Patient Spider,’’ Whitman makes no
use of rhyme, apart from the near internal
rhyme that occurs in line 5, ending the first
stanza, and the near rhyme that links the last
two lines of the poem. He makes occasional use
of assonance (the repetition of the same vowel
sounds), as in the near rhyme at the end of the
last two lines of the poem and in the repetition of
the longisound at the end of line 1 and in the
first word of line 2 (which creates a link at the
level of sound between the spider and the poet).
The main organizing principle of the poem, how-
ever, is the line. These are long poetic lines, and
aside from the final periods at the end of each
stanza, each line ends in a comma. The last three
lines in the second stanza are longer than the
others, which suggests at once the tireless repeti-
tion of the activity of the soul and its attempts to
expand itself, to stretch itself out so that it can
make the connections it desires.
Historical Context
Renaissance in American Literature
In the 1840s, the established poets in the United
States were William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wads-
worth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John
Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell.
They were all from New England and were
known as the Fireside Poets. Their poetry was
popular and conventional, making use of tradi-
tional rhyme and meter and often being easy to
memorize. However, the nation’s literature was
about to experience a renaissance. InFrom Puri-
tanism to Postmodernism: A History of American
Literature, Richard Ruland and Malcolm Brad-
bury trace the beginning of this new period to the
publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s book
Naturein 1836, which rejected the past and gave
expression to a fresh, forward-looking vision for
America. A year later, Emerson was invited by
the Harvard College chapter of the educational
organization Phi Delta Kappa to give the annual
address at the Harvard commencement ceremo-
nies. The result was the famous address ‘‘The
American Scholar,’’ in which Emerson stated,
‘‘Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship
to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.
The millions that around us are rushing into life,
cannot always be fed on the sere remains of
foreign harvests.’’ Emerson expected that ‘‘poetry
will revive and lead in a new age.’’ It was an
optimistic vision of literary independence for a
nation that was still only several generations old.
Emerson was to become the leading voice in
the American transcendentalist movement, and
he has been described (by Mark Van Doren) as
‘‘the prophet of his generation.’’ Ruland and
Bradbury comment on Emerson’s influence:
‘‘Throughout the 1840s, an increasingly confi-
dent temper was to grow, partly through Emer-
son’s stimulation, in American writing.’’ They
point out that between 1850 and 1855 a number
of remarkable new works were published in the
genres of novel, essay, and poetry, including
Emerson’sRepresentative Men(1850), Nathaniel
Hawthorne’sThe Scarlet Letter(1850) andThe
House of the Seven Gables(1851), Herman Mel-
ville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Henry David Thor-
eau’sWalden(1854), and finally the first edition
of Whitman’sLeaves of Grass(1855). Whitman’s
great if yet-small collection of poems, which was
quite unlike anything seen in American literature
up to that point, was published in the same year
as Longfellow’s immensely popular epic poem
The Song of Hiawatha, based on Native Ameri-
can legends.
Whitman, the new voice, continued to write
alongside established poets, such as Longfellow,
who retained their popularity while he at first
struggled to find an audience. Indeed, Longfel-
low was the most celebrated of nineteenth-
century American poets, a much-beloved house-
hold name. On Longfellow’s death in 1882, how-
ever, Whitman, now an established poet himself,
praised the deceased but identified him with
America’s derivative past rather than with the
vital, truly American poetry that he believed he
was himself writing. Longfellow ‘‘is not revolu-
tionary, brings nothing offensive or new, does
not deal hard blows,’’ Whitman wrote inSpeci-
men Days. He wrote in his final preface toLeaves
of Grassin 1888 (‘‘A Backward Glance O’er
Travel’d Roads’’) that he knewLeaves of Grass
had a particular relationship with the times, as it
‘‘could not possibly have emerged or been fash-
ion’d or completed, from any other era than the
latter half of the Nineteenth Century, nor anyA Noiseless Patient Spider