Slang In America Summary

Walt Whitman’s “Slang in America” and Burgess’ “A Defense of Slang”, both authors express how they favor slang and see it as a way to breathe life to language a sort of new style.The two authors do differ in which Whitman views poetry as a product of slang, whereas Burgess refers to slang as similar, but not as accepted as poetry is.
Both authors believe that slang allows people to escape the unspoken laws of literalism and bring interest into the language. Whitman views slang as a way of people abstaining from the literal norm of prosaic wording, “an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism,” (Whitman 1). Whitman also says this at the end of his essay, saying that language is a body and slang breathes life into it, “afterward