The free-wheeling, chant-like form of the lines of Song of Myself make it clear that Whitman took Emerson’s idea to heart. “It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,-a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.” Emerson suggested that the day of formal poetic meter, an old European invention, was coming to an end: Whitman was greatly inspired by American thinker and man of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had argued in 1844 that it was time for America’s poets to come up with distinctly new and American-born forms of poetry. Walk with me a while and let me see if I can share some ideas that will help orient you toward understanding and enjoyment of Song of Myself. I would like every reader to have access to this remarkable multi-faceted, landmark work.

It is also an important document in the history of American culture.” For, as Robert Haas, critic and editor of Whitman’s work has written, “It was then and is now an astonishment, perhaps the most unprecedented poem in the English language. Though written using everyday vocabulary completely free of traditional poetic structures, this poem may at first seem odd or hard to decipher.

However, not every reader has this experience when first attempting this strange and beautiful, yet down-to-earth, poem. I know of no other poem expressing such total love and acceptance for every kind of person, especially common American working people, embracing every kind of human experience, even every aspect of creation and the universe, from vegetation to animals to the cosmos. Each time I read this work again, I am inspired, joyful, puzzled yet enlarged, and uplifted. In Whitman’s sweet and stunning poem Song of Myself, first published in 1855, grass becomes the overarching symbol for the people of the new democratic America: common, plentiful, vigorous, and every one precious. “A child said ‘What is the grass?’fetching it to me with full hands / How could I answer the child?”*

A song of myself