Song of Myself

Walt Whitman was born on 31 May 1819 in Long Island New York. Without much formal education he began work at an early age as an office boy printer and school teacher. His first major collection of poetry Leaves of Grass was selfpublished in 1855. During the American Civil War Whitman volunteered as a nurse at military hospitals in Washington and his experiences inspired his next collection DrumTaps published in 1865 and Memoranda During the War (1875). Whitman was an ardent Democrat and wrote several poems to Abraham Lincoln including śO Captain! My Captain. His poetry was seen by many as immoral and was the cause of his dismissal from a post as clerk in the Department of the Interior but he won praise from his contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and his work was enthusiastically received by poetic circles in England. Having survived a paralysing stroke in 1873 Whitman left Washington for Camden New Jersey where he continued to write up until his death on 26 March 1892.Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself.(I am large I contain multitudes.)Abundant ecstatic generous courageous this is the first American epic poem a celebration of selfhood and a catalogue of nineteenthcentury American life of all ages and races. Revolutionary in style and controversial in content when it was first published in 1855 Whitmans masterwork has since inspired generations with its intoxicating rhythms and images and its inclusive praiseful joy.THE ORIGINAL 1855 TEXTGrand but intimate earthy but also dreamyWhitman had a fluid personality that made him able to merge invisibly and with great empathy with the images of other people and events that lodged in his mind...unprecedented assembling of rhythm sound language and imagesThe great unrhymed longlined selfcelebratory sensation of the 1850s