“Song of Myself” ranks among Walt Whitman’s greatest and most famous works, and it was among the original twelve pieces in the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). Like most of the other poems in that edition, this one received extensive revision. The final version appeared in 1881, at which point it received its current title. Prior to 1881, the poem had been called “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American,” and, in later editions, simply “Walt Whitman.” The poem’s shifting title suggests something important about the poem’s speaker, who identifies himself as Walt Whitman. This self-identification reflects the poem’s initial conception as the poet’s self-celebration. However, the later emphasis on the more abstract framing of “myself” suggests how the “I” at the poem’s center may be understood as a symbolic figure of selfhood more generally. As the speaker puts it in line 391: “What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?” These questions stand at the heart of the poem, in which the speaker exuberantly explores the capacious nature of the individual self. In fact, the speaker’s idea of the self is so capacious that it often seems all-encompassing, at once unifying all oppositions and expressing the profound interconnection between “self” and “other.”

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