Walt Whitman begins his poem “Song of Myself” with a rejection of the longest-lasting literary tradition, an evocation of the Muse. Rather than a Homeric “Muse, sing in me” moment, Whitman writes, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” Sing in me, self! he seems to say. I am no vessel for divine inspiration! Rather, he is an individual capable of inspiring himself, a reflexive action no less exultant than his first few unusual verbs: “I celebrate myself,” “I sing myself,” “I breathe the fragrance myself,” I “go bathe and admire myself.”
Whitman soon makes it clear that his words are “not words of routine,” the words you’d expect from the hirsute man on the cover of your safe, traditional-looking Penguin Classics edition. Would you expect this grandfatherly man to invent phrases like “tubercled by rum” or “soft balsamic busses”? I certainly didn’t. I mean, how much more fun can you have with language? A certain “gymnosophist” and “venerealee” appear. If I ever need a bewildering exclamation I’ll use “You sweaty brooks and dews…!” A nice complement might be that you look like a “fibre of manly wheat” today. And who knew you could make stucco a participle? Whitman writes that he is “stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over.”
But seriously. It’s a big project to reinvent and revive a language! Whitman is part of that generation of American writers that were trying to write a national literature. They had no tradition or inheritance. They glanced at England but shifted their gaze back home. American literature couldn’t just be a pale imitation of any other established literary lineage—it had to be something completely new, not routine.
“Do you guess I have some intricate purpose? / Well, I have,” he writes. “I must get what the writing means.” And to get at what the writing means he must “abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet nearer being.” “What is known”—that is, the whole history of the English language—“I strip away.” What is left? A radical, ecstatic, self-aware, fleshy, inventive poem. Go out and read it, you sweaty brooks and dews!
