Foreword

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. 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. 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. He sets out to expand the boundaries of the self to include, first, all fellow Americans, then the entire world, and ultimately the cosmos. 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?

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. 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. The atoms that yesterday composed a living cow or a growing plant today are part of us, as the eternal atoms of the universe continue their nonstop interaction and rearrangement.

It is in this way that Whitman introduces us to his two main characters, “I” and “you.” This section begins with “I” and ends with “you,” just as the entire “Song of Myself” does the same: we experience the transfer of energy from Whitman’s “I” to the “you” that we as readers learn to inhabit in this poem. It is possible to hear the “you” in “Song” as addressed to the entire nation or the entire world, and it is also possible to hear it as intimately addressed only to the individual reader in this particular moment of encounter. It is one of the most difficult words in the poem to translate, because the second-person pronoun in English is quite promiscuous: “you” is the word we use to address our most intimate lover as well as a total stranger, a single person alone with us in a room or a vast crowd. Whitman teases out all the implications of this promiscuous English pronoun that signals at once only you, a “simple separate person,” and also you, the “en masse,” the world of potentially intimate strangers who always hover around us. Translators must decide in each case whether the “you” is informal or formal, singular or plural.

The speaker of the poem “loafes” and observes “a spear of summer grass,” and the entire poem is generated in that act. Thinking of the land he grew up in and of his ancestors, he realizes that every leaf of grass is a sign of transference, like the grass that grows from graves, as the atoms of the dead arise again out of the earth and now give voice to him, forming the very tongue that will sing of his past (his organ of vocalization is literally made up of the atoms of the land he sings on and sings about). So “Song of Myself” starts us out on what the poet will call “a perpetual journey,” one that turns into an escape narrative for all readers of the poem, who need to liberate themselves from all the enslaving beliefs and possessions that prevent individual growth, who need to put “Creeds and schools in abeyance” and risk a journey that will take us beyond preconceived notions of “good” and “bad,” a journey that will allow us to confront the “original energy” of nature unchecked, nature freed of the restraints that we have all been taught to put on it.

—EF