Song of Myself
Song of Myself, long poem by American poet Walt Whitman, first published in the collection Leaves of Grass in 1855. Considered Whitman’s most important work, and certainly his best-known, the poem revolutionized American verse. It departed from traditional rhyme, meter, and form and introduced frank sexual imagery.
Composition and revisions
“Song of Myself” contains 52 sections and some 1,300 lines. Originally published untitled, the opening stanza read:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
However, Whitman revised and added to Leaves of Grass throughout his life, ultimately producing nine editions. These revisions included assigning the expansive, exuberant poem numbered sections. It was given its current title in 1881, inspired by a notable addition to the first line: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.”
Form and themes
As with the rest of the poems in Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself” is written in a new form of free verse without orthodox rhyme or meter. Among the poem’s characteristic elements are repetition, exclamation, and an incantatory voice. Many sections, compelling in their unrelenting rhythm, are catalogs of individuals, locations, and actions that move the poet. In the 1855 version, Whitman characterizes himself as “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, / Disorderly fleshy and sensual.…eating drinking and breeding” and “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from.”
The poem also celebrates physical health and sexual passion, with lines that catalog all parts of the human body, from bowels to armpits to genitals, regardless of prevailing taboos against such explicit reference. Such lines also made the poem controversial, despite their clear spiritual element, and Leaves of Grass in all its subsequent editions was commonly challenged by censors in Whitman’s lifetime. (For further discussion see Leaves of Grass.)
Whitman and the American Renaissance
“Song of Myself” was composed during the American Renaissance, a period in American literature heavily informed by Romanticism, a movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Among the interests of Romantic artists were folk cultures and national and ethnic origins, and they injected these interests in their national literatures, often through scenes and characters representing the attitudes and characteristics of “the folk.” The American Renaissance was thus based on a vigorous expression of a national spirit. New England-based writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne sought to create a literature that captured American themes and expressed new ideas such as Jacksonian democracy and Transcendentalism. Leaves of Grass was written partly in response to these nationalistic ideals and partly in accord with Whitman’s ambition to cultivate and express his own personality. A striking characteristic of “Song of Myself” and other poems in the collection, such as “I Sing the Body Electric,” is the pronounced use of the pronoun “I.” In Whitman’s work, “I” asserts a mythical strength and vitality.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Queer themes and legacy
For the frontispiece to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman used a picture of himself in work clothes, posed nonchalantly with cocked hat and hand in trouser pocket, as if illustrating the line in “Song of Myself”: “I cock my hat as I please indoors and out.” The image is a rough-hewn version of earlier photos of Whitman in which he presented himself as an urban dandy. Many critics have noted the queer themes in “Song of Myself” and in poems that Whitman added to later editions of Leaves of Grass, especially his “Calamus” poems. These themes added to the controversies surrounding the collection, and they have also contributed to the belief that Whitman was himself gay or bisexual.
Although Leaves of Grass received little critical acclaim during Whitman’s lifetime, Whitman came to be seen as one of the greatest American poets, and “Song of Myself” is regarded as a landmark American poem.