Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself…

The lines come in section 51, the next-to-last section of “Song of Myself”, the long poem at the heart of Leaves of Grass. Evening is falling and the poet is about to leave. He calls to a “Listener up there”, asks him to talk honestly, since “I stay only a minute longer”, and answers in advance any charge of inconsistency. Right after, he waits “on the door-slab” for a companion: “Who wishes to walk with me?”

Throughout the poem Whitman has identified himself with every kind of American, from the runaway slave to the President; a self that large must contain contradictions. In the final section he sounds his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”.

Whitman published the poem, untitled, in the first Leaves of Grass in 1855, and revised it all his life; it became “Song of Myself” in 1881. The lines echo Emerson, who had mocked “A foolish consistency” and who warmly greeted the first Leaves of Grass.

Song of Myself (Leaves of Grass), section 51, edition of 1882, 1855

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work