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Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself'
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13341 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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6 / 1995 |
1,042 Words |
| Author
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Brock Brower
Brock Brower is a novelist (The Late Great Creature) and
journalist in Washington, D.C. He has recently written on
Whitman's decade in the nation's capital for Civilization. |
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
These three lines open the greatest poem ever written about man's impetuous but abiding faith in democracy. They are the first stanza of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"--if "stanza" isn't too confining a word for the way he divided up his eloquent, free-ranging poem. They also began a revolution in poetry, set off by Whitman in 1855 when he published "Song of Myself" as the first and longest entry in his Leaves of Grass. From these three lines forward, American poetry becomes modern, ever after.
Until then, Whitman was a penny-press journalist, a self-styled loafer, and an urban rebel--"an American, one of the roughs," he describes himself in this very poem, then adds, "a kosmos." You'd expect the style he created to be defiantly his own, and to a wondrous extent, it is. "Free verse," without rhyme or formal meter, its lines let run to whatever series of images or length the poet chooses. Whitman actually set much of the type for Leaves of Grass himself and later told Oscar Wilde he composed his poetry in his head in the same way, running his long lines out to the end of an imaginary printer's stick.
But all along, he knew how to write traditional verse and used its prosodic tricks and wiles, under the surface where you don't notice them, to enrich his poetry. It is fascinating to see how slyly he works his words to achieve his impact with these three evocative
... (1928 of 6116 Characters)
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