“Like Whitman my great predecessor”: The Legacy of Leaves of Grass in O’Hara and Williams

Abstract

This article examines the enduring influence of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass on the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Frank O’Hara, tracing a lineage that links the democratic selfhood and attention to the everyday across three generations of American poets. By foregrounding Whitman’s fusion of self-presentation with mundane experience, the article demonstrates how the poet’s approach to ordinary objects and quotidian life establishes a model of relational subjectivity. William Carlos Williams inherits this vision by situating his poetic self within the material realities of local environments in Paterson. The article argues that in Leaves of Grass, Whitman’s interest in the creative potentials of the self conditions his engagement with the commonplace subject matter. Based on this insight, the article positions the relationship between the self and mundanity in Williams’s and O’Hara’s poetry as exemplary of Whitman’s influence on their verse.