Song of Myself - Couverture souple

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 self-published in 1855. During the American Civil War, Whitman volunteered as a nurse at military hospitals in Washington, and his experiences inspired his next collection, Drum-Taps, published in 1865, and Memoranda During the War (1875). Whitman was an ardent Democrat, and wrote several poems to Abraham Lincoln, including ‘O 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.

Song of Myself may be the greatest poem ever written by an American. First published in 1855 as part of Leaves of Grass, it was revised and expanded by Whitman in subsequent editions in ways that sometimes undermined to its original freshness and vitality. Stephen Mitchell has gone back to the first edition and painstakingly compared it with the later versions, substituting only those revisions by Whitman that improved the poem. Here is Whitman at his most wild and raw, as large and lusty as life, fulfilling his promise to all future generations: I stand on this spot with my soul.