- “Song of Myself” is a poem by Walt Whitman (1819–1892) that is included in his work Leaves of Grass. It has been credited as “representing the core of Whitman’s poetic vision.”
- The poem was first published without sections as the first of twelve untitled poems in the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass. The first edition was published by Whitman at his own expense.
- This poem did not take on the title “Song of Myself” until the 1881 edition. Previous to that it had been titled “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” and, in the 1860, 1867, and 1871 editions, simply “Walt Whitman.” The poem’s shifting title suggests something of what Whitman was about in this piece. As Walt Whitman, the specific individual, melts away into the abstract “Myself,” the poem explores the possibilities for communion between individuals. Starting from the premise that “what I assume you shall assume” Whitman tries to prove that he both encompasses and is indistinguishable from the universe.
- In the second (1856) edition, Whitman used the title “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American,” which was shortened to “Walt Whitman” for the third (1860) edition.
- The poem was divided into fifty-two numbered sections for the fourth (1867) edition and finally took on the title “Song of Myself” in the last edition (1891–2). The number of sections is generally thought to mirror the number of weeks in the year.
- The poem is written in Whitman’s signature free verse style. Whitman, who praises words “as simple as grass” (section 39) forgoes standard verse and stanza patterns in favor of a simple, legible style that can appeal to a mass audience.
- Critics have noted a strong Transcendentalist influence on the poem. In section 32, for instance, Whitman expresses a desire to “live amongst the animals” and to find divinity in the insects.
- In addition to this romanticism, the poem seems to anticipate a kind of realism that would only become important in United States literature after the American Civil War. In the following 1855 passage, for example, one can see Whitman’s inclusion of the gritty details of everyday life: The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case, / (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room;) / The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case, He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript; / The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table, / What is removed drops horribly in a pail; / The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove, … (section 15)
- In the poem, Whitman emphasizes an all-powerful “I” which serves as narrator, who should not be limited to or confused with the person of the historical Walt Whitman. The persona described has transcended the conventional boundaries of self: “I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe …. and am not contained between my hat and boots” (section 7).
- There are several other quotes from the poem that makes it apparent that Whitman does not consider the narrator to represent a single individual. Rather, he seems to be narrating for all:
- “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” (Section 1)
- “In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less/and the good or bad I say of myself I say of them” (Section 20)
- “It is you talking just as much as myself… I act as the tongue of you” (Section 47)
- “I am large, I contain multitudes.” (Section 51)
- Alice L. Cook and John B. Mason offer representative interpretations of the “self” as well as its importance in the poem. Cook writes that the key to understanding the poem lies in the “concept of self” (typified by Whitman) as “both individual and universal,” while Mason discusses “the reader’s involvement in the poet’s movement from the singular to the cosmic”. The “self” serves as a human ideal; in contrast to the archetypal self in epic poetry, this self is one of the common people rather than a hero. Nevertheless, Whitman locates heroism in every individual as an expression of the whole (the “leaf” among the “grass”).
- Canadian doctor and long-time Whitman friend Richard Maurice Bucke analyzed the poem in his influential and widely read 1898 book Cosmic Consciousness, as part of his investigation of the development of man’s mystic relation to the infinite.
- Simon Wilder delivers this poem to Monty Kessler in With Honors. Walt Whitman’s work features prominently throughout the film, and Simon Wilder is often referred to as Walt Whitman’s ghost.
- The poem figures in the plot of the 2008 young adult novel Paper Towns by John Green.
- A documentary project, Whitman Alabama, featured residents of Alabama reading Whitman verses on camera.
- The poem is central to the plot of the play I and You by Lauren Gunderson.
- “Song of Myself” was a major inspiration for the symphonic metal album Imaginaerum (2011) by Nightwish, as well as the fantasy film based on that album.
- The protagonist of the film Nine Days (2020) recites selections of the poem at its conclusion.
- Commentary:
- Whitman’s grand poem is, in its way, an American epic. Beginning in medias res—in the middle of the poet’s life—it loosely follows a quest pattern. “Missing me one place search another,” he tells his reader, “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” In its catalogues of American life and its constant search for the boundaries of the self “Song of Myself” has much in common with classical epic. This epic sense of purpose, though, is coupled with an almost Keatsian valorization of repose and passive perception. Since for Whitman the birthplace of poetry is in the self, the best way to learn about poetry is to relax and watch the workings of one’s own mind.
- While “Song of Myself” is crammed with significant detail, there are three key episodes that must be examined. The first of these is found in the sixth section of the poem. A child asks the narrator “What is the grass?” and the narrator is forced to explore his own use of symbolism and his inability to break things down to essential principles. The bunches of grass in the child’s hands become a symbol of the regeneration in nature. But they also signify a common material that links disparate people all over the United States together: grass, the ultimate symbol of democracy, grows everywhere. In the wake of the Civil War the grass reminds Whitman of graves: grass feeds on the bodies of the dead. Everyone must die eventually, and so the natural roots of democracy are therefore in mortality, whether due to natural causes or to the bloodshed of internecine warfare. While Whitman normally revels in this kind of symbolic indeterminacy, here it troubles him a bit. “I wish I could translate the hints,” he says, suggesting that the boundary between encompassing everything and saying nothing is easily crossed.
- The second episode is more optimistic. The famous “twenty-ninth bather” can be found in the eleventh section of the poem. In this section a woman watches twenty-eight young men bathing in the ocean. She fantasizes about joining them unseen, and describes their semi-nude bodies in some detail. The invisible twenty-ninth bather offers a model of being much like that of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball”: to truly experience the world one must be fully in it and of it, yet distinct enough from it to have some perspective, and invisible so as not to interfere with it unduly. This paradoxical set of conditions describes perfectly the poetic stance Whitman tries to assume. The lavish eroticism of this section reinforces this idea: sexual contact allows two people to become one yet not one—it offers a moment of transcendence. As the female spectator introduced in the beginning of the section fades away, and Whitman’s voice takes over, the eroticism becomes homoeroticism. Again this is not so much the expression of a sexual preference as it is the longing for communion with every living being and a connection that makes use of both the body and the soul (although Whitman is certainly using the homoerotic sincerely, and in other ways too, particularly for shock value).
- Having worked through some of the conditions of perception and creation, Whitman arrives, in the third key episode, at a moment where speech becomes necessary. In the twenty-fifth section he notes that “Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself, / It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically, / Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?” Having already established that he can have a sympathetic experience when he encounters others (“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person”), he must find a way to re-transmit that experience without falsifying or diminishing it. Resisting easy answers, he later vows he “will never translate [him]self at all.” Instead he takes a philosophically more rigorous stance: “What is known I strip away.” Again Whitman’s position is similar to that of Emerson, who says of himself, “I am the unsettler.” Whitman, however, is a poet, and he must reassemble after unsettling: he must “let it out then.” Having catalogued a continent and encompassed its multitudes, he finally decides: “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” “Song of Myself” thus ends with a sound—a yawp—that could be described as either pre- or post-linguistic. Lacking any of the normal communicative properties of language, Whitman’s yawp is the release of the “kosmos” within him, a sound at the borderline between saying everything and saying nothing. More than anything, the yawp is an invitation to the next Walt Whitman, to read into the yawp, to have a sympathetic experience, to absorb it as part of a new multitude.
Song to Myself – Walt Whitman
About the Author: Abirlal Mukherjee (Mukhopadhyay)
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