By Walt Whitman
Section 1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. Section 6 A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? . . . And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Section 51 Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Section 52 The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.
ON THIS PAGE
Summary · Analysis and Themes · Form and Structure · Historical Context
In Popular Culture · Related Poems
Summary
“Song of Myself” is a sprawling, exuberant meditation in fifty-two sections, less a story than a vast act of self-celebration that keeps expanding until the single self of the title has absorbed the whole world. It opens with the speaker celebrating himself and immediately insisting that what he claims for himself belongs equally to the reader — every atom of him is also the reader’s. From this first gesture the poem moves outward, loafing, observing a blade of summer grass, and asking what that grass might mean.
Across its many sections the poem catalogues American life in teeming detail — workers, landscapes, bodies, the living and the dead — drawing all of it into the expanding “I” of the speaker. It embraces contradiction openly, declaring that a self large enough to contain multitudes need not be consistent. By the close, the speaker dissolves into the natural world, bequeathing his body to the dirt to grow as grass, and promises the reader that he waits, somewhere ahead, to be found again. The poem ends not with a conclusion but with an open invitation across time.
Analysis and Themes
Whitman set out to write a genuinely American poem, and “Song of Myself” pursues that ambition by making the individual self the gateway to everything — the body, democracy, nature, and death all flow through the single expanding “I.”
The Self That Contains Everyone
The “myself” of the title is not a private ego but a self deliberately opened to include everyone. The opening lines refuse to keep any claim for the speaker alone: what he assumes, the reader must assume too. As the poem proceeds, the “I” absorbs slaves and presidents, the suffering and the joyful, the living and the dead, until individual identity becomes a channel for a shared, collective existence. This is Whitman’s democratic vision in its purest form — the conviction that every person contains, and is contained by, every other.
Grass as the Central Symbol
When a child asks “What is the grass?” the speaker admits he cannot say for certain, then offers a cascade of answers: it is the flag of his hopeful disposition, the handkerchief of the Lord, and finally “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” Grass becomes the poem’s master image because it grows everywhere, equally, over rich and poor alike, and because it springs directly from the buried dead. In a single blade Whitman fuses democracy, regeneration, and the continuity of life through death — the grass is proof that nothing truly ends.
Contradiction and the Untamed Voice
Whitman anticipates the charge that his sprawling poem contradicts itself and answers it head-on: “Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Consistency, he suggests, is too small a virtue for a self meant to hold the whole of life. The same impulse drives his “barbaric yawp,” the untamed, untranslatable cry he sounds over the rooftops — a declaration that this voice refuses the polite conventions of poetry in favor of something rawer and more alive.
Death as Continuation
The poem’s ending transforms death into a kind of dispersal rather than an end. The speaker bequeaths his flesh to the dirt to grow again as the grass he loves, and tells the reader to look for him “under your boot-soles.” Far from a final farewell, the closing lines reach forward to every future reader — “I stop somewhere waiting for you” — collapsing the distance between the poet and anyone who opens the book. The self that began the poem by celebrating itself ends by promising to outlive its own death.
Form and Structure
“Song of Myself” is the founding monument of American free verse. It abandons regular rhyme and meter entirely, building its rhythm instead from long, breath-driven lines that swell and recede like speech or oratory. In its final form the poem is divided into fifty-two numbered sections — a number sometimes read as the weeks of a year — though this structure emerged only gradually across Whitman’s revisions.
The poem’s most distinctive device is the catalogue: long accumulating lists of people, places, and actions that sweep across the American scene and enact, formally, the poem’s claim to contain everything. Whitman binds these catalogues with anaphora, the repetition of opening words and phrases, which gives the verse its incantatory, almost biblical cadence. The free-verse form is inseparable from the poem’s meaning — its refusal of fixed measure is itself a declaration of democratic openness and personal liberty, a poetry made to match a new and boundless self.
Historical Context
Whitman self-published “Song of Myself” in 1855 as the long, untitled opening poem of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which appeared around Independence Day that year. He paid for the printing himself, had the book set by the Rome Brothers in Brooklyn, and by his own account set some of the type by hand. The first edition contained only twelve poems and a prose preface; the title page did not even name the author. It sold poorly, but Ralph Waldo Emerson, on receiving a copy, wrote Whitman a now-famous letter of praise — which Whitman promptly published without asking permission.
Whitman revised and expanded Leaves of Grass for the rest of his life across multiple editions. The opening poem was titled “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” in 1856 and shortened to “Walt Whitman” in 1860; the numbered-section structure developed over later editions, and only in the 1881 edition did the poem receive both its final fifty-two-section form and the title “Song of Myself.” The text most readers know today is the 1891–92 “deathbed” edition. Written in the years before the Civil War, the poem reflects Whitman’s deep faith in American democracy and the equal dignity of every individual, ideas he drew in part from the Transcendentalism of Emerson and from the meditative tradition of the English Romantic ode.
In Popular Culture
The poem’s “barbaric yawp” became one of its most enduring phrases through the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, in which Robin Williams’s teacher urges his students to sound their own yawp over the rooftops, cementing the line in popular memory as a cry of self-expression.
Whitman’s declaration “I contain multitudes” has had an even longer afterlife, passing into common speech as a way of claiming inner complexity. Bob Dylan took it directly as the title of his 2020 song “I Contain Multitudes,” and the phrase is regularly invoked in writing about identity and contradiction.
Related Poems
- I Hear America Singing by Walt Whitman: Whitman’s compact democratic chorus of ordinary workers, distilled from the same vision that drives this poem.
- When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman: The same faith in direct, lived experience over secondhand abstraction, in miniature.
- O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman: Whitman’s most formal and conventional poem, a revealing contrast to the free verse he pioneered here.
- Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth: The Romantic meditation on self, memory, and nature that helped model Whitman’s expansive inward voyage.