As suggested by its title, “Song of Myself” is poem that features a first-person speaker who is devoted to exploring and reflecting on who they are. Unpacking just who this speaker is thus becomes one of the reader’s key tasks. In one sense, the speaker’s identity is quite simple to determine: it’s Whitman himself. The speaker indicates as much in section 24 (lines 497–500):

     Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
     Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
     No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,
     No more modest than immodest.

The poem’s publication history reflects the speaker’s identification with Whitman. Early editions of the poem carried the title “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American,” and some shortened this title simply to “Walt Whitman.” Only with the 1881 edition did Whitman arrive at the final title, “Song of Myself.” Read in concert with the poem’s publication history, the above passage gives us readers license to read the speaker as a reflection of the poet himself. And indeed, the poem does feature numerous biographical details that come straight from Whitman’s own life. The poem could therefore be understood as response to the suggestion the speaker makes to himself in line 568: “Walt you contain enough, why don’t you let it out then?”

However, despite naming himself as “Whitman,” the speaker arguably exceeds the bounds of any one person. After all, the speaker spends much of the poem aiming to demonstrate that he encompasses the entire universe. The sheer expansiveness of this speaking self is thus more of an abstracted ideal than a concrete person. Consider the degree of omniscience the speaker exhibits throughout the poem. In section 33, for instance, the speaker offers an epic catalog of people of all ages and backgrounds, an act that implicitly positions him as someone with a privileged view of all parts of society. In this same section he also makes a claim about the geographical—and even cosmic—reach of his vision and sense of self (lines 710–716):

     Space and Time! now I see it is true, what I guess’d at,
     What I guess’d when I loaf’d on the grass,
     What I guess’d while I lay alone in my bed,
     And again as I walk’d the beach under the paling stars of the morning.

     My ties and ballasts leave me, my elbows rest in sea-gaps,
     I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents,
     I am afoot with my vision.

All-seeing and all-encompassing, the speaker is an inexhaustible being who, as he famously puts it in line 1325, “contain[s] multitudes.” Yet for all his expansiveness, the speaker ultimately seems less invested in proving his own exceptionalism than he does in discussing the expansive nature of selfhood more generally. It isn’t just his self that contains multitudes; all selves do. In this regard, the speaker of Whitman’s poem could be understood as an allegory for the self—any self.

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