At the beginning of the astonishing sixty-five-page sprawl he’d later call “Song of Myself,” Whitman swept aside anything he’d written before, as if with one powerful gesture he pushed off his desk everything no longer useful to him. What went crashing to the floor? His own tentative early poems, and the expected forms and decorum of American poetry. Where does a poet find such courage, the will and stamina to make a radical beginning? It must lie in an internal imperative to give form to the inchoate: something that hasn’t been spoken, not yet articulated in a way that resonates with the felt texture of experience. The unsaid can be the source of an enormous pressure, a nearly physical need to say what living is like. If the poetic vocabulary of one’s day, the stances and forms of the hour, don’t seem capable of incorporating the way the world feels—well then, the pressure is intensified. Perhaps that’s why the three opening lines of Whitman’s poem, and of his book, seem to geyser out of the depths; he has waited so long to find them, for these words to emerge as if from nowhere:
I celebrate myself,
And what I shall assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Thus Whitman introduces the man he has become or invented to the world. A useful edition of Whitman edited by Robert Hass, Song of Myself and Other Poems, includes a lexicon that defines unfamiliar words in the title poem and explains what ones that seem familiar meant in Whitman’s day. Hass notes that in 1855 celebrate meant more an act of religious observance—“the priest celebrated the Eucharist,” for instance, or “the family celebrated Passover”—than it suggested either happy affirmation or throwing a party.
The poet’s first action here is to praise, affirming and elevating his own body and soul, but from his second line it’s plain that the notion of self here will not go uncomplicated.
And what I assume you shall assume is an act of performative speech, the kind of bold assertion (like “I now pronounce you man and wife”) in which something becomes true because a person in authority says it is. The source of this authority, at this very early point in the poem, is perhaps only the speaker’s confidence. Assume can mean to suppose, taking some premise as a given, or it can mean to take something on, as in to assume power, or you might take responsibility for something not originally yours, as in assuming a debt. Thus the line could be taken as supremely arrogant; why should we think or feel or take on the responsibilities the speaker in this poem does? How would he have any way of knowing? His assertion doesn’t make sense until the line that follows: For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Poetic imagination isn’t usually directed by the will. Some other part of the self seems to go forward on its own as—beginning in image or metaphor or music, a phrase that floats up and sticks in the mind—a poem begins. Stanley Kunitz used to say his poems began in sound, and sense had to fight its way in. Whitman’s poems, in his great early heyday, seem to have begun in voice. I’d guess this new and commanding speaker and his headlong assertions simply rose up in Whitman. He’d have had to figure out who it belonged to; this tone and manner seemed to bear no relation to anything else he’d written. This speaker has two boots planted firmly on the ground, and stands at his full height. The sweeping confidence in these opening lines sets the tone for the entire outpouring to follow.
Who is it this voice addresses? It seems too big and public to be directed toward a lover or a friend, and yet there’s an intimacy about it, too. You wouldn’t say every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you to just anyone. It feels too personal for that, a claim of radical proximity—though it’s also a sly reminder that atoms don’t belong to anyone. They don’t hold still, so what’s a part of you today may not be tomorrow. On that level of reality what would ownership mean, anyway?
If all atoms are held in common, then differences between us are immaterial: the color of your skin, your gender, your material wealth, the degree of privilege any of these grant you—as immaterial, on the atomic level, as whether you were born in Gdańsk or Havana. Whitman says that our assumptions—what we understand, what we take into ourselves as we read his poem—can be the same because we are constituted in the same way. Is this true? The poem declares that this is a foundational truth for the pages to follow, that the poem operates under this law.
These three lines also establish the poem in the present tense. Whitman’s not telling us about something that already happened; his poem operates in the now, and seems to report on thinking, feeling, and perception. Along the way we’ll hear short narratives of remembered experience, family stories, even the tale of a sea battle the speaker’s heard about. But the body of the poem seems spoken in the moment of its composition, which lends the voice a living edge, and helps to account for the poem’s aura of timelessness. Because the text acknowledges the present tense of its own making, the reader seems to receive it in that same present tense, or at least a contiguous present. This is an aspect of Whitman’s modernity, anticipating what readers find in the poems of Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, who likewise trace the motion of awareness, out to say how it feels to be alive from moment to moment.
Who talks this way, or has such an easy relationship to certainty? Who is this man to celebrate himself? From its very beginning, the poem asks us to take up the question of who this I might be. That first sentence is so direct and authoritative as to make it seem an article of faith, a proclamation nailed to the poem’s door. A thesis statement is a risky place to start anything other than a brief essay for English 1, a poem most of all, but Whitman emblazons one of the poem’s guiding principles right at the start. He wants us to know this is no ordinary poem. Not a lyrical evocation of feeling, not an account of an experience leading to an epiphany, not a moral lesson nor a hymn of praise—though it will contain all those things. The model of “Song of Myself” is rhetorical, and oratorical: a principle has been stated, and thus the poem has set up the work ahead of it to convince us that this axiom is true.
Which is more off-putting, praising yourself in the first poem in your first book, or beginning it with a one-sentence distillation of your theme? What I shall assume you shall assume seems almost peremptory at first; who dares to dismiss our difference, and say we’ll play along, accepting—even if just for the duration of the poem—his notions? This is the first instance of Whitman’s most seductive gesture. He asserts that the speaker knows something we do not, although this realization is available to us, and he will lead us toward it. He likes giving us a glimpse of our future: I will be even with you, and you shall be even with me, he writes a few lines later, and then, a page later, this remarkable promise: Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.
There are readers who don’t want to be told what will happen to them, who resist being included in this way or dislike the idea of being subsumed in a larger, collective self for which this voice seems to speak. For many others these claims are both tantalizing and compelling; the writer seems to know we are here, not as a collective gaze but as I and I, or you and you; the poem feels spoken to each of us in particular, and has a quality of inevitability about it: Stop this day and night with me is an invitation to respond now, at the moment you read that phrase, and it continues with promise and prediction: and you shall possess the origin of all poems.
The poem, speaking from its continuous present into our moment of attention, seems always to know that you, its reader, are there. You will not go unseen.