What does Whitman mean by "He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher"? I read this quote on Daughter of Invention by Julia...

Walt Whitman was what we can an iconoclast, literally someone who breaks the icons. An iconoclast is someone who "seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions." In other words, he broke all the established rules of poetry writing--and some of society as well.

He introduced a new form of poetry: free verse. There is no set meter or rhythm or rhyme scheme. It is almost like an essay written out line-by-line. Critics, mostly those "teachers" he was talking about in the quotation, hated his work. They called it "artistic laziness and exhibitionism, looseness and vulgarity" and attributed his "pioneering to ignorance and ineptitude."

So what Whitman was telling us is that if we want to follow his style, we need to forget everything we've learned about how to write poetry.

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