Blevins, a poet and essayist who has taught at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in the Virginia Community College System, is the author of The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, a chapbook of poems, and has published poems, stories, and essays in many magazines, journals, and anthologies. In this essay, he investigates Whitman's use of image and how it serves "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," as well as certain sound repetitions within the poem and how they and Whitman's diction or word choice work to formalize Whitman's free verse and produce "an attitude of wonder and awe."

Walt Whitman is among the greatest and most original of American poets. He is among the most daring of poets from any age or nation, has had as much influence in our tradition as Shakespeare, and in many ways single-handedly gave birth to the modern movement in American poetry...