“I Hear America Singing” tries hard not to be a poem. Structural unity slightly emerges from the repeated word “singing” and from the use of “The” in the beginnings of most of the lines like a chant. Form emerges from the gorgeously indulgent listing of occupations that sweeps the willing reader along with dizzying kinetics of lists. In addition, the jobs the poem celebrates make a pattern—land to sea, country to city, day to night, men to women—but that pattern is at best loose.

So what is the form? Because it abides no regular beat nor offers the rhyme schemes typical of poetry before Whitman, the text—can it be called a poem?—seems formless and careless. Indeed, until a generation of poets born after the trauma of World War One and seeking ways to upcycle all the inherited traditions in the arts as a way of breaking free of the burden of the past, tapped into Whitman’s reinvention of form, his poetry was dismissed as free verse, with the suggestion that it is somehow off the cuff and sloppy writing. If this is poetry, who couldn’t be a poet?

The form, however, is subtle, variable, strategic, unexpected—but hardly free.