"Song of Myself" is an epic poem by Walt Whitman that is included in his work Leaves of Grass.
The poem was first published without sections and appeared as the first of twelve untitled poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Today it is one of the best-known poems in the book. The first edition was published by Whitman at his own expense.
In the edition of 1856, Whitman used the title "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American", which was shortened to "Song of Myself" in the 1860 edition. The poem was divided into fifty-two numbered sections in the 1867 edition.
There seems to be a strong Transcendentalist influence on the poem, a theory somewhat validated by Ralph Waldo Emerson's enthusiastic letter praising the first edition of Leaves of Grass. In addition to this romanticism, the poem seems to anticipate a kind of realism that would only come to the forefront of United States literature after the American Civil War.
In the following 1855 passage, for example, we can see...
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