I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume…

These are the opening lines of “Song of Myself”, the long poem at the heart of Leaves of Grass. The poet celebrates himself, then at once shares it all with the reader: every atom of him belongs to you as well. The next lines set a scene of deliberate ease, “I loafe and invite my soul”, while “observing a spear of summer grass”, and he presents himself, born of parents born here, “now thirty-seven years old in perfect health”.

Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself in 1855, with his portrait in workman’s clothes and without his name on the title page. The poem had no title then; he revised it for decades, and the text quoted here is that of the 1881–82 edition, where it took its final name. Ralph Waldo Emerson greeted the first edition with a famous letter: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

The “myself” is every self, which makes it a poem of democracy.

Song of Myself (Leaves of Grass), section 1, opening lines (1881–1882 edition), 1882

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work