A Song of Myself For All of Our Selves

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

These are the first lines of Song of Myself written by Walt Whitman (born May 31, 1819).  Song of Myself, considered to be one of the first free verse poems ever written, is part of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, originally published in 1855. 

Many artists obsess over when their work is finished, whether it's a writer revising a published piece, a director recutting a finished film (Star Wars, anyone?) or an actor wincing at a filmed performance and wishing they had done it differently.  Also, these days many people are self-publishing their work and thinking it a new and original thing to do.  Well, neither the tinkering nor the self-publishing are new.  Walt Whitman paid for the publication of the first two editions of  Leaves of Grass (and without Kickstarter).  In the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the poem Song of Myself was an untitled, 1,336 line poem printed as one single verse. 

There were eight editions of Leaves of Grass printed in Whitman's lifetime.  Changes were made to Song of Myself in every edition.  The second edition added the title 'Walt Whitman,' the next edition it was 'Poem of Walt Whitman, an American.'  The poem wasn't called Song of Myself until near the end of Whitman's life. 

In addition to the evolution of the title, Whitman separated the poem into fifty-two segments and changed lines in verses during different phases of his life.  Robert Hass, author of On Whitman's Song of Myself, writes, "He's an older man when he's writing the last version of the poem," Hass says. "So the first version says 'I come again and again' [as if to say] 'I'm here; I'm always here.' There's another line in the poem that says 'urge and urge and urge / always the procreant urge of the world,' [indicating] the continuous presence of the sexual energy of living. And in the last version, he says 'I depart,' which means everything's coming and going." 

Another paragraph from Hass describes the radicalism of free verse: "I think people associated free verse with ... the parts of Whitman's 'I Hear America Singing' that sound like 19th century political oratory," says Hass. "So people didn't quite know how to deal with his free verse and basically didn't for 50 years. Then in 1911-12, the young Modernist poets started to experiment with free verse, which they thought of as not an American thing coming out of Whitman but as an avant-garde technique coming out of France. ... It really wasn't until Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl that somebody took what Whitman had done and tried to do something more with it."  You can read more by Robert Hass here.



Whitman in 1891

There's a ton of information about Whitman all over the web.  City College New York has a cool online exhibit.  Those of you who are interested in book restoration/preservation, the University of Iowa did a restoration project with a first edition copy of Leaves of Grass & a broadside (pictured above left).  The Library of Congress has some interesting photos and information about Whitman's later years.  Finally, you can read Song of Myself in its entirety courtesy of Princeton University.  By the way, the photo of Whitman at the right was taken by Thomas Eakins in 1891.  It's one of my favorite photgraphs of all time.