In Search of a Modern Epic: on the Generic Status of Walt Whitman’s song of mysel

The aim of the article is to show the affinities of S ong o f M y self by Walt Whitman, an American Romantic poet, with the classical epic poem, on the basis of the theory of genre evolution propounded by such Polish scholars as Ireneusz Opacki, Michał Głowiński and Andrzej Zgorzelski. The first part discusses the status of S ong o f M y self as an epic poem as it is perceived by American literary historians. Then the extensive analysis of the poem’s elements and devices is conducted, pointing to their roots in the classical epic. However, the dominant tendency in the poem is the strategy of simultaneous evocation and subversion of the epic tradition. As a result, S ong o f M y self emerges as an innovative poem, a precursor to the later Modernist ‘long poems’, and serves as the link between the classical epic poem and the extended poetic works or sequences of the twentieth century. In the final analysis, the role of S ong o f M y self is seen to consist in harking back to the tradition of classical epics on the one hand, and in its radical modification, and thus it seems to launch a new poetic genre.