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Why did Walt Whitman avoid traditional rhyme and meter?

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“Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos” — Walt Whitman American poet Walt Whitman, photograph by Mathew Brady.

Walt Whitman avoided traditional rhyme and meter primarily to cultivate a poetic style that felt natural, simple, and commensurate with the vastness and spirit of the United States. Influenced by the Romantic movement, he believed a poet’s chief function was to express their own personality, and he sought to create a "national literature" that was rugged and untamed, rather than one that borrowed from European conventions.12

By eschewing orthodox prosody, Whitman aimed to reflect the "roughs and beards and space" of the American experience. He developed a form of free verse that relied on oratorical rhythms, anaphora, and the repetition of syntactical units—techniques often derived from biblical verse—to create a sense of movement and space. This approach allowed him to express his persona as a "shaggy, untamed poetic spokesman" and to portray the relationship between the individual, the body, and the universe in a new, more authentic way that transcended contemporary aesthetic constraints.1234