I celebrate myself, and sing myself

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I celebrate myself, and sing myself

• Walt Whitman
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• Walt Whitman was born in West Hills,
  Huntington on Long Island in New York, second of
  nine children born to Walter Whitman and Louisa
  (Van Velsor) Whitman. One of his siblings, born
  prior to him, did not make it past infancy. His
  most famous work is Leaves of Grass, which he
  continued to edit and revise until his death. A
  group of Civil War poems, included within Leaves
  of Grass, is often published as an independent
  collection under the name of Drum-Taps.

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• The first versions of "The Leaves of Grass" were
  self-published and poorly received. Several poems
  featured graphic depictions of the human body,
  enumerated in Whitman's innovative "cataloging"
  style, which contrasted with the reserved Puritan
  ethic of the period. Despite its revolutionary
  content and structure, subsequent editions of the
  book evoked critical indifference in the US
  literary establishment. Outside the US, the book
  was a world-wide sensation, especially in France,
  where Whitman's intense humanism influenced the
  naturalist revolution in French letters.

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• By 1865 Walt Whitman was world-famous, and Leaves
  of Grass had been accepted by a publishing house
  in the US. Though still considered an iconoclast
  and a literary outsider, the poet's status began
  to grow at home. During his final years, Whitman
  became a respected literary vanguard visited by
  young artists. Several photographs and paintings
  of Whitman with a large beard cultivated a
  "Christ-figure" mystique. Whitman did not invent
  American transcendentalism, but he had become its
  most famous exponent and was also associated with
  American mysticism. In the 20th century, young
  writers such as Hart Crane, William Carlos
  Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac
  rediscovered Whitman and reinterpreted his
  literary festo for younger audiences.

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• I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
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• And what I assume you shall assume,
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• For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to
  you.
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• I loafe and invite my soul,
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• I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of
  summer grass.
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• My tongue, every atom of my blood, formd from
  this soil, this air,
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• Born here of parents born here from parents the
  same, and their parents the same,
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• I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health
  begin,
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• Hoping to cease not till death.
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• Creeds and schools in abeyance,
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• Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are,
  but never forgotten,
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• I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at
  every hazard,
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• Nature without check with original energy.
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• "Song of Myself" is a poem by Walt Whitman that
  was included in his book of poems Leaves of
  Grass. The poem appeared as the first of twelve
  untitled poems in the 1855 edition, and it is one
  of the best-known poems in the book. In the
  edition of 1856, Whitman titled it "Poem of Walt
  Whitman, an American." It was called "Song of
  Myself" in the 1881-82 edition.

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• The poem was divided into fifty-two numbered
  sections in the 1867 edition.There seems to a
  strong Transcendentalist influence on the poem, a
  theory somewhat validated by Ralph Waldo
  Emerson's enthusiastic letter praising the first
  edition of Leaves of Grass. And yet, in addition
  to this romanticism, the poem seems to anticipate
  a kind of realism that would only come to the
  forefront of United States literature after the
  American Civil War.

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• In this poem Whitman seems to put himself in the
  center, but the "self" of the poem's speaker -
  the "I" of the poem - should not be limited to or
  confused with the person of the historical Walt
  Whitman. This is an expansive persona, one that
  has exploded the conventional boundaries of the
  self.