Whitman’s First-Person Plural

Abstract

In his 1855 poem that he continually reworked for twenty-five years and eventually titled "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman pulsates between the singular and the plural, reflecting on both the single "spear of summer grass" and the vast, multitudinous "journey-work of the stars." 1 The poet constantly toys with the distinction between the one and the many in this text, which has become one of the most quintessential of American poems. This is partially achieved through his experimentation with poetic lists. His penchant for catalogues, especially in Leaves of Grass, has both fascinated and frustrated readers since its initial publication. Upon reading the collection for the first time, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, "I expected-him-to make-the songs of the Nation-but he seems-to be contented to-make the inventories," 2 and in 1896 John Burroughs called the poem "a series of ejaculations, utterances, apostrophes, enumerations. .. with little or no structural or logical connection" (Miller xix). Were it not for the "intimate sense of the man back of all," Burroughs exclaimed, "the piece would be wild and inchoate" (Miller xix). Whitman himself acknowledged that "it is the catalogue business that wrecks them all-that hauls them up short, that determines their opposition. They shudder at it" (Miller 145). Despite the sometimes negative associations with the poem's catalogue form, more than one third of "Song of Myself" is made up of lists, displaying a steadfast aesthetic commitment to what can often feel an excess of enumeration. Many have linked this technique to an explicitly American expression of democratic equality. This is partly because Whitman's lists are often composed of a diverse range of American subjects, including but not limited to farmers, "lunatics," police officers, enslaved people, children, women, carpenters, and thieves, among many others. In his foundational essay "Transcendental Catalogue Rhetoric: Vision Versus Form," Lawrence Buell connects these stylistic experiments to the American Renaissance and its fascination with transcendentalist idealism, arguing that Whitman accentuates the "democratic side" of this philosophy, supporting its conception of "all persons and things" as "symbols of spirit. .. conjoined by analogy in an organic universe." 3 Similarly,