Song of Myself
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"Song of Myself" is a poem by Walt Whitman that was included in his book of poems Leaves of Grass. The poem appeared as the first of twelve untitled poems in the 1855 edition, and it is one of the best-known poems in the book. In the edition of 1856, Whitman titled it "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American." It was called "Song of Myself" in the 1881-82 edition.
The poem was divided into fifty-two numbered sections in the 1867 edition.
There seems to a strong Transcendentalist influence on the poem, a theory somewhat validated by Ralph Waldo Emerson's enthusiastic letter praising the first edition of Leaves of Grass. And yet, in addition to this romanticism, the poem seems to anticipate a kind of realism that would only come to the forefront of United States literature after the American Civil War. In the following 1855 passage, for example, we can see Whitman's inclusion of the gritty details of everyday life :
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case,
He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bedroom;
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He turns his quid of tobacco, his eyes get blurred with the manuscript;
The malformed limbs are tied to the anatomist's table,
What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
The quadroon girl is sold at the stand . . . . the drunkard nods by the barroom stove ... (section 15)
In this poem Whitman seems to put himself in the center, but the "self" of the poem's speaker - the "I" of the poem - should not be limited to or confused with the person of the historical Walt Whitman. This is an expansive persona, one that has exploded the conventional boundaries of the 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).
[edit] External links
- Full text of the poem: http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/logr/log_026.html
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