In the Library
Song of Myself
Walt Whitman, 1855
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 52
- Length
- Length 16k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Odyssey
Homer
Homer invented the singing self that contains multitudes; Whitman just dropped the disguise of Odysseus and sang as himself.
£1.99
Self-Reliance
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson lays out the same faith in the sovereign, expansive self that Whitman later sings, but argues it as prose philosophy rather than sprawling free verse.
£1.99
About the book
"I celebrate myself, and sing myself": the line should land as arrogance and somehow arrives as an embrace. Song of Myself, the poem that opens Leaves of Grass, turns that first gesture into a promise to the reader, for whatever the speaker assumes, you shall assume, and the wall between two strangers goes thin as paper. Across fifty-two sections of free verse, Whitman pulls the whole republic into one long breathing line, the carpenter and the prostitute, the runaway slave and the president, no one set above another, because verse without meter refuses to rank a person. A child asks him what the grass is and he answers a dozen ways, each truer than the last, the common green of every dooryard pressed living into your hand. To read it is to feel a single self widen until it has room for everyone inside it, the boast at the poem's close arriving as nothing but the truth: you are large, you contain multitudes.