In the first three lines, he abandons the two main things that separate people, that create animosity, jealousy, and war-beliefs and possessions: “what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to you as good belongs to me.” At every level of our being, we are incessantly transferring and exchanging materials, ideas, emotions, affections.

Throughout the poem, Whitman probes the question of how large the new democratic self can become before it dissipates into contradiction and fragmentation, and each time he seems to reach the limit, he dilates even more. When we come to see just how vast the self can be, what can we do but celebrate it by returning to it again and again? He sets out to expand the boundaries of the self to include, first, all fellow Americans, then the entire world, and ultimately the cosmos. He “celebrates” that self, and the etymology of the word “celebrate” indicates “to return to” or “to frequent.” The whole poem will be Whitman’s record of the self expanding out into the world, absorbing more and more experience, then contracting back into the self, discovering that he can contain and hold the wild diversity of experience that he keeps encountering on his journeys through the world. Instead of invoking the muse to allow him to sing the epic song of war, rage, and distant journeys, Whitman becomes his own muse, singing himself and announcing that the subject of his epic will be himself. More recordings will be added over time.Whitman opens his poem with a conventional iambic pentameter line, as if to suggest the formal openings of the classic epics, before abandoning metrics for a free-flowing line with rhythms that shift and respond to the moment. Many of these recordings were made for, others are either studio or public performances recorded at schools, libraries, and other locations. These recordings were make in a variety of venues and times, so recording qualities differ.Īlso included in this collection are other Whitman poems, along with a few samples from his prose writings in Specimen Days. The 52 sections are also assembled into four groups of 13 poems each. He lived comfortably in the 19th Century world, however it manifest.Īll 52 individual sections of Song of Myself are now downloadable. Whitman is true, natural and spontaneous, without affectations. In it he celebrates himself not simply as the poet Walt Whitman in all of his great complexity, but he transcends his own 'me-ness' and in doing so welcomes and embraces all of humanity and the natural world each and every corner of it equally, without reservation. Song of Myself is the core of Walt Whitman's opus magnum, Leaves of Grass.

Song of myself poem