I Hear America Singing and When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

Both of these poems by Walt Whitman are examples of free verse, poetry that has no fixed pattern of rhyme, meter, line length, or stanza arrangement. Write one or two paragraphs in which you analyze how Whitman uses free verse for effect and how this effect suits each poem’s message. Also explain how Whitman uses free verse’s key structural elements of repetition and parallelism and how they affect the poems.