Walt Whitman: Song of Myself

FOREWORD

“Song of Myself” is by far the greatest poem ever written by an American. At each rereading I feel exhilarated, as if for the first time, by its freshness and breadth of vision, its bodiliness, its high spirits, its astonishing empathy, by the freedom and goofiness and dignity of its language, and, not least, by its spiritual insight. It is a miracle of a poem.

But a pocket edition? To shrink this expansive, world-swallowing language even to the size of a normal book is a bit absurd. (The first edition measures eight inches by eleven, and its lines seem to go on for miles.) Still, I think Whitman would have been touched at the prospect of being carried around in the breast or hip pockets of young men and women, intimately, close to the flesh.

A few words about the text presented here. Whitman’s vision and his language were at their most powerful in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855. As he grew older, his insight faded, and with it the vivacity of his words. Yet in each successive edition he kept tinkering with “Song of Myself” and the other early poems — adding, deleting, revising. And while certain of these revisions are excellent, most are disastrous. This has led to affectionate frustration among some of Whitman’s readers; we want the best of all possible editions.

For example, in a passionate and deservedly famous passage about music the text of the 1855 edition reads:

I hear the violincello or man’s heart’s complaint,
And hear the keyed cornet or else the echo of sunset.

I hear the chorus . . . . it is a grand-opera . . . . this indeed
is music!

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the trained soprano . . . . she convulses me like the climax
of my love-grip;
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,
It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,
It sails me . . . . I dab with bare feet . . . . they are licked by
the indolent waves,
I am exposed . . . . cut by bitter and poisoned hail,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine . . . . my windpipe squeezed in
the fakes of death,
Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.

Whitman incorporated two brilliant revisions in the second (1856) edition. There, line two reads:

I hear the keyed cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears, it
shakes mad-sweet pangs
through my belly and breast.

And line eight:

It wrenches such ardors from me, I did not know I possessed them

In 1860 he rewrote the transition from lines twelve to thirteen in this way:

my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel

On the other hand, in the 1867 edition Whitman ruined the sixth line by replacing its dangerous sexuality with a phrase that is colorless, almost meaningless, and with a rhythm straight out of a hymn-book:

I hear the train’d soprano (what work with hers is this?)

And he entirely deleted the weird and thrilling ninth line.

If I were forced to choose between the original and any of the revised versions, I would certainly choose the former. But why give up anything that makes a great poem even greater? Why not keep the revisions that enliven and clarify, and disregard the ones that don’t? The passage then sounds like this:

I hear the violoncello or man’s heart’s complaint,
I hear the keyed cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears, it
shakes mad-sweet pangs
through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus . . . . it is a grand-opera . . . . this indeed is music!

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the trained soprano . . . . she convulses me like the climax of
my love-grip;
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches such ardors from me, I did not know I possessed them,
It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,
It sails me . . . . I dab with bare feet . . . . they are licked by
the indolent waves,
I am exposed . . . . cut by bitter and poisoned hail,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine . . . . my windpipe throttled in
fakes of death
At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.

In this conflated version of “Song of Myself,” I have used the first edition as my main source, and I have adopted any revision that seemed like even a minor improvement. The section numbers, which first appeared in 1867, may be useful in providing a more readily apparent structure, but they are often arbitrary, and they impede the uninterrupted flow of one stanza into the next, over the whole expanse of the poem.

Although none of the poems had titles in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, I have kept the 1876 edition’s “Song of Myself” because it is so familiar. Certainly the poem embodies an outrageous egotism, an “I” so shamelessly naked that even a bodhisattva can admire it. But Whitman was also writing about selflessness, about the Self beyond the self (“I and this mystery here we stand”; “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am”), and it would have been just as appropriate to call the poem “Song of My Self,” in the Upanishads’ sense of the word:

Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings,
vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle,
unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat.

Egotism and selflessness: one contradiction among many. But the poem is large . . . . it contains and embraces multitudes.

Purchase at Barnes & Noble

Purchase as an Audiobook