Walt Whitman’s Leaves on Grass and Pablo Neuda’s Canto General as Lyric-epic Books of Poems

Abstract

The article attempts to analyse typological similarities in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda which can be traced in the generic peculiarities of their major works, Leaves of Grass and Canto General. It is concluded that Leaves of Grass and Canto General constitute the books of poems composed of non-fabular lyric-epic poems with an epic dominant. Moreover, the two books have a lyrical “I” which is at once individual and universal. However, the poets who lived in different eras create the poems with the opposite endings: Walt Whitman’s poems have a monologic ending characteristic of Romanticism, while Pablo Neruda’s ending is polyphonic, which transcends the boundaries of Romantic thought and aligns Canto General with Latin American total novel.