Parallelism in Whitman’s "leaves of the grass"

Abstract EN

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is an exceptional poet both in the position he occupies in the American literature and in the kind of poetry he wrote.

Whitman's poetry is unconventional especially in his use of parallelism and its relation to the unity of nature, which he both held and expressed in his poems.

In other words, he used parallelism to describe nature and through which God's presence in the working of nature.

Parallelism is a literary activity, which aims at creating patterns on the verbal level with the effect of creating texture and unity besides the aesthetic effect that such patterns offer to the work.

Parallelism is a familiar phenomenon in art but to shed some light on it in Whitman's poetry in relation to his concept of unity can be of great help for us to appreciate his poetry.