Prof. Bruce Harvey
Nine
Key Points about Whitman's "Song of Myself"
1.
The job of the poet is the "vivification" of everyday American experience (Whitman
expresses these ideas in his essay "Backward Glances);
Whitman's
techniques to accomplish "vivification":
--no Old World images/theme
--not
fancy diction
--natural
rhythm of breath rather than imposed & constricting meter
--lists
& vignettes in which sheer presence or palpability of an object, person, or
scene is rendered beautiful
(examples: #5 pokeweed, #11 bather scene, #24 beetle
dung)
2.
Whitman's
empathetic "caresser" (#13) poetic persona is the bard of union, thus (go to
next two points):
3.
Politically--we are all equal under democracy; so no hierarchy in lists
(example #15: list includes prostitute, etc.)
4.
Spiritually--discrete individualities give form to what Emerson would
call the "over-soul" (see also "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry")
5.
Death and life part of ongoing cycle; Whitman, drawing upon Hinduism,
believes in incarnation/immortality (examples #48 & #52)
6.
Whitman
celebrates union with the universe at large; some techniques:
--diffuse,
cosmic copulation images (#24)
--images
of vastness (#20)
--images
of fluid identity and of nature/self intermingled (#2)
7.
Body/soul not opposed categories of self (Thoreau, by contrast, insists
that we be chaste, deny our appetites, seek what he calls "higher
laws")
8.
Emotional/spiritual selves should join in feeling of
"buoyancy"; essential optimism avoids the trivial or intellectual
"trippers and askers" (#4)
--epiphany when "Soul" plunges into "heart" (#5)
--"Backward Glasses" (middle paragraph 451) speaks of need for
buoyancy
--poet inflates or "buoys" up reader in #40
--in "As I Ebb'd
with the Ocean of Life"
Whitman explores opposite feeling: anxious, deflated, fragmented self
9.
If poet is the mediator between reader and democratical "en masse" or exterior world, his self (even though empathetic) must
maintain a certain resilience. Thus
fear of actual contact, of a potential breaking of boundary of self in #27.