From Song of Myself (1891-92)

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1     I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
     And what I assume you shall assume,
     For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

     I loafe and invite my soul,
5     I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

     My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
     Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
     I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
     Hoping to cease not till death.

10     Creeds and schools in abeyance,
     Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
     I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
     Nature without check with original energy.

Editor´s Comments

Walt Whitman has had an enormous influence on the poets who came after him. Ezra Pound wrote a poem about Whitman in which he speaks as a grown-up child to his "pig-headed" father. He decides it's time to make up their quarrel, and says "It was you that broke the new wood,/ Now is a time for carving." Pound's praise is a bit qualified, of course: he gives credit to Whitman for opening up new possibilities for the use of poetic language, but he doesn't think Whitman was quite as good a craftsman as Pound himself intends to be.

The new wood that Whitman broke so decisively was the language of poetry. He abandoned the traditional forms of poetry and wrote in free verse. His lines don't rhyme, they have no consistent meter, and they're not even close to the same length. But that doesn't mean that they are without form:

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Instead of the repetition of rhyme and meter, he used other kinds of repetition. He loved lists and catalogues, for example, and even in the few lines I quoted, you can hear a tiny sample of that: this soil, this air. There are more complex patterns of repetition in the syntax of the lines: "born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same." He builds a long line with patterns like this, creating a sense of endlessness, as if the line could go on forever. And then when he breaks the pattern, he initiates a new rhythm and brings his passage to unmistakable closure: "Hoping to cease not till death."

People had to learn how to hear this new kind of poetry, but when they did, they heard poets who hadn't even been born yet.

Text History

The first appearance of "Song of Myself" was in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, where it lacked its current title. In the second edition, 1856, it was called "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American," and in 1860 it became simply "Walt Whitman." It assumed its current title in 1881. The version used here is based on the "deathbed" edition of 1891-92 and differs in other ways as well from the 1855 printing.

Click here to see the photograph of Whitman which was used as the frontispiece for the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

Click here to see the manuscript of "Song of Myself," in Whitman's own hand.

$Manuscript of "Song of Myself" written in Whitman\'s own hand.$

Historical Considerations

Although Whitman was celebrated by many of his fellow writers as the greatest poet of his time, his work was often shocking to the tastes of nineteenth-century America, particularly in its open discussion of sexuality and in its acknowledgment of homosexual desire. As a result, he found many important avenues of publication closed to him. Even in old age, with his reputation secure, he felt his exclusion from respectable literary society.

Click here to see "An old-age growl," a note which he wrote on the back of an envelope, complaining about his treatment by the periodicals (June 1890).

The Poet´s Life and Work

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