THE SONG OF MYSELF

Walter Whitman was born in West Hills near Huntingdon on Long Island, New York, May 31 1819 and spent some of his youth in Brooklyn. Due to his limited formal education he began his working life as an office boy and was subsequently a printer, journalist, and itinerant schoolteacher around Long Island. He also entered the political fray as a Democrat before moving to New Orleans, back to New York, to St Louis and Chicago writing for various newspapers and journals after 1848. He published some of his own writings but it was not until well into his thirties that he displayed the poetic powers that would make him America's most influential poet of the nineteenth century.

For many years Whitman continued to add to the initial twelve poems, with twenty-one new poems in the 1856 second edition, 122 in the third of 1860 and more in six more editions of revisions and additions. Whitman was involved in the American Civil War as a clerk in Washington and a nurse (1862-5) in a volunteer hospital. The experience here affected him greatly and some of his feelings on the subject can be found in hisDrum-Taps (1865) that was later included in Leaves of Grass and in the prose piece Memoranda during the War (1875).

Whitman was not accepted by the public at large, possibly due to his sexual frankness and homosexuality, possibly due to the rough image he cultivated. However, his star rose with the praise bestowed upon him by English writers such as Swinburne and Rossetti. Although his later writing from Camder, New Jersey (particularly after a paralytic stroke in 1873) lacked the verve and originality of the earlier poetry he was the prime influence upon writers such as Hart Crane and Allen Ginsberg due to his new exploration of individual freedom and radical experimental writing.

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.

3 
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the 
beginning and the end, 
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

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.

24 
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, 
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, 
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from 
them, 
No more modest than immodest.

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 yaws over the roofs of the world.

What do you think?