Another way to ask this question would be: What isn't
"Song of Myself" about?! Walt Whitman's long poem, with its 52 sections of open verse,
is about just about everything under the sun.
Take the
opening section for example. It begins talking about an "I," the speaker (who in a
number of ways resembles the poet himself) and "you" (whom I've always taken to be the
reader or listener of the poem). The speaker then quickly moves on to talk about his
soul and spears of summer grass, the smells in the air, his breath, the pleasures of the
body and of nature and of the city, all sorts of human experiences and occupations, and
on an on. In the end, I suppose it's not easy to answer in just a sentence or two what
this poem is about.
My best attempt would be to say that
"Song of Myself" is about affirmation (finding "good" all over the place) and about the
beauty and delight of both the human body and the human soul. To me, it's always meant
a lot that Allen Ginsberg singled out one line in Whitman's poem for particular praise:
"I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones." He said that the meaning of the
line really hit him and stuck with him when he heard his fleshy high school English
teacher read the line aloud.
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