Song of Myself by Walt Whitman (1855)

"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.