Whitman: Leaves of Grass

Abstract

In its American way, the ‘I’ of ‘Song of Myself’ (1855)¹ remains as unresolved and as disintegrated as the ‘I’ of either Arthur Gordon Pym, or Moby-Dick, or Huckleberry Finn. In this respect it contrasts as much with the more settled ‘I’ of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805) as does Huck with the Pip of Great Expectations (1861). I make this claim despite the apparent confidence about the self proclaimed in the opening line of ‘Song of Myself’ and regularly thereafter. Such moments of assurance in Whitman are always the proclamation of a thesis against which the antithesis is pressing starkly and destructively. This precariousness is evident even in the final poem of ‘Song of Myself’, when we might have expected the work as a whole to have reached its reassuring destination, and the ‘I’ to be able to ‘suppose’, as can the ‘I’ at the end of The Prelude, ‘my powers so far confirmed’:²

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.