English Lit Lyrical Poetry Byron Taylor

Walt Whitman – ‘Song of Myself’

Analytically, it seems difficult to acutely define what Whitman’s intentions were with ‘Song of
Myself’, beyond the obvious incantations of his own ego, and mission to embody his nation’s
spirit. The scope and plurality of this poem is un-debatable and astonishing: it’s only
consistency seems to be the stubborn, almost stifling simplicity and perspicuous syntax of his
free verse, determined to escape all poetic forms preceding. His famously audacious shrug,
‘Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)’ – must remain one of the
most self-conscious and bold ripostes, to academic posterity and futurity in literature. It seems
to defeat the plethora of contextual definitions that have awoken since his death - as if the
magnitude of his artistry embraces and dismisses suchlike approaches simultaneously: as if all of
them were already intellectually-foreseen and overshadowed by Whitman’s ‘intricate purpose’.
Yet, in the following essay, it will be examined how this enormously self-absorbed poet was
still privy to the powers of chance, and that his escape from the iambic pentameter and the
other Euro-centric conventions, allowed his expression to wander freely from his own critical
faculties and narcissistic contrivance.

‘Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,

If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me...

Speech is the twin of my vision... it provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,

Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then ? i

This excerpt from stanza twenty-five, feels isolated in the poem, though deceptively so: while
the atmosphere of self-absorption perpetuates, a melancholy tinge of laboriousness pervades also.
The passage feels like a rare glimpse of humility and recognition, that elasticity and vigour is not
a continual presence in life or writing. ‘If I could not now and always...’ conveys more
weariness than exuberance, and is more convincing of Whitman meditating and rebounding
from hard work and discipline, than any of the rural-portraits (‘I but use you for a minute, then
I resign you, stallion’ etc.), that are sprinkled around the poem like confetti. Here, the Sun is

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not just another component of spiritual unity, pantheism and spiritual synthesis. His art and his
commitment to it, he admits, is not an inconsequential past-time but a penultimate catharsis of
his existence – without which the rupture of another day would ‘kill’ him, and the
megalomaniac proportions he has committed towards. His self-belief was never fostered by
admiration in his lifetime, yet he worked incessantly and circulated his writing as if already of
global renown (even taking opportunities to write his work glowing reviews). Carl Sandburg
once comically noted how Whitman ‘invited himself to take a header into literature, accepted
the invitation, and went to the party unabashed, in his shirt-sleeves and in a slouch-hat.ii’

Within this excerpt of the poem, however, is the man’s uncommon acceptance that he is finite
– ‘you contain enough’ differs greatly in stress and emphasis from ‘I am large, I contain
multitudes’. ‘Tremendous’ is the dominant word of its line, in syllables, the stanza beginning
with ‘dazzling’ and ‘tremendous’ as declarative forms of emphasis, and of Whitman’s
inexhaustible exuberance. Yet after such declarations, the line seems to almost mutter and
retreat into the periphery of the reader’s attention, its one-syllable conjunctives, and lack of
pause or punctuation forbidding the reader to dwell on its content formidably. The oratorical
gesture of his statement is beginning to diminish in confidence.

The same applies to the other aforementioned passage, beginning ‘Speech is the twin of my
vision’. When read in the meditative, almost funereal tempo this interpretation suggests, there
is a distinguishable declivity, sloping from ‘speech’, to ‘twin’, to ‘vision’. After this, the
personifications of this ‘Speech’ are assembled and wrest out with what, when vocally omitted,
sounds timid, punctuated and repetitiously assembled with begrudging brevity: ‘it is unequal...’
‘It provokes me...’,‘it says sarcastically…’.

Were Whitman to write this notion in a metre or format more measured than free verse, the
words would be incarcerated to present ‘speech’ and ‘vision’ as equal devices, towards perhaps
(to follow one of the conventions of lyrical verse) the activity of longing, for some
unmentioned Muse, extending the personification to a more focused purpose. Instead,
Whitman’s free verse here resounds with the poetic rhythm of his own inner thoughts,

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bickering within him; in the same way Wordsworth described the ‘many recognitions, dim and
faint’ to sensually convey the process of solitude and cogitation.

Here, the tone of the stanza becomes clarified: that Whitman is perplexed by self-doubt, as
confirmed by the final ‘writing and talk do not prove me’, and with the unconvincing
regurgitations that follow, the reader is permitted view of a depth beneath the self-fabled
‘kosmos’, and all the implications such claims comfortably accommodate. His repetition
transmits as more childlike than analytical, and the personification feels more a laboured
extension of his self-inversion, than an inventive and vivid flourish.

However self-consumed his intentions appear, it is clear that he is learning the need to enlarge
his motifs beyond himself , and to become covetous towards the world he has claimed such love
for: the next stanza begins ‘Now I will do nothing but listen, to accrue what I hear into this
song, to let sounds contribute toward it’. The oratory aspect has deflated to breathlessness: and
its place on Whitman’s stage is replaced by a ‘grand opera’ and ‘a bravuras of birds’ – in its wake,
admitting ‘I lose my breath’.

His preoccupation with ‘speech’ and ‘vision’ becomes more diversified and distorted, in an
unexpected manner in stanza thirty-three. There is arguably no stranger extract in the poem, or
one that shudders on the page with more sinister ambiguity.

‘I am a free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires,

I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,

I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.

‘My voice is the wife’s voice, the screech by the rail of the stairs,

They fetch my man’s body up dripping and drowned’.iii

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The wayfaring outdoorsman tone is elbowed out by a monstrous image, of Whitman as a

cantankerous scavenger, ‘free’ and unbridled by moral code or remorse for his barbarous
appetites. ‘Invading’, ‘tighten’, and the onomatopoeia of ‘screech’, all dominate the reader’s
concentration, and emphasise the corporeal carnality of this excerpt. It comes and goes, buried
at the end of an exceptionally long stanza, with no explanation or further reference. There is no
familiarity with the characters mentioned, other than their function in relation to Whitman,
who is here serving his omniscient tone to infiltrate darker circumstances than before, with an
unblinking, nightmarish speed in the rigidity of his repetition: ‘I am a...’, ‘I bivou ac...’, ‘I turn
the...’, ‘I tighten her...’, void of any emotion, which gives it a quality all the more chilling.
Comparing the woman’s voice to the screech of a railway train, is devastating in the swiftness of
its assessment, rather than using enjambment to make the scene more claustrophobic to the
reader. The ‘vision’ is now no longer Whitman’s physically; but is now ours as readers all-too
vividly, and his omnisciently: with a distant, de-gendered and detached voyeurism, he imagines
his own body rising, bedraggled and lifeless from a lake.

It’s almost robotic functionality in describing the actions of its narrator, recalls William
Burroughs. Of all the Beats, Allen Ginsberg was most apparent in his appropriation of Whitman
(mainly through repetition at the beginning of each line, like ‘America’ and ‘Footnote to
Howl’), though passages of this nature were exactly the type from which Burroughs extracted
the darker underbelly of literature, from Whitman to Joyce. What Whitman viscerally
preconceived, was the disassociation between the different senses that Burroughs and later
generations would transgress towards the cut-up technique, in ‘The Naked Lunch’ and ‘The
Ticket Exploded’. It as if Whitman is gazing into the ‘watchfire’, and conjuring in his
imagination the wealth of American literature to come, of varying tendencies and
preoccupations – this passage felt like an unearthed enigma, carefully concealed.

There is a sense of punctuated and rejuvenated energy from the twenty fifth stanza
onwards; that ‘Song of Myself’ was a vehicle of specificity, a recurrent mood that struck its
author, periodically, with an ameliorating power that lent gravity to moments when morbidity
threatened his swollen confidence – that re-affirmed to him the vastness of the experience he

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felt was richly unique, the mind and the character that he felt demanded the communion of
posterity. What he did not realise, was that the break from traditional poetic form, occasionally
allowed for insights into the poet he could not predict or contrive, wherein more valuable
glimpses of his psyche shine through. To the reader, the exercise seems as if to accelerate,
retreat, question, cast pre-emptive dismiss on criticism – and over the duration, both perpetuate
the impulse of celebration, and concludes in accepting the unfathomable task, of creating a
human portrait as comprehensive as Whitman’s ego strove his poem to be.

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Bibliography

ip. 50, Whitman, Walt, ‘Leaves Of Grass’, Walton Street Oxford, Oxford University Press
World Classics, 1990. Print.

p. vi, Detroit Public Library, ‘Walt Whitman: Leaves Of Grass Centennial’, Detroit,
ii

Michigan, 1955. Print.

p. 59, Whitman, Walt, ‘Leaves Of Grass’, Walton Street Oxford, Oxford University Press
iii

World Classics, 1990. Print.

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