I received the following question by email from a student in the class and thought it might be useful for all of you to hear my response. Feel free to jump right in with your own comments on the matter!
(Originally posted 1-15-2010)
Q:Speaking of Whitman, Song of Myself just gets more and more confusing! For example, part 8 starts with a suicide and then he goes off
on a rant about the happenings of town?? Similarly, in part 22 he mentions that he loves the sea, and then all of a sudden mentions that he accepts virtue and vice just the same?
A: I think you are likely reading Whitman online, without the benefit of the Norton Anthology biography and introduction to Whitman? Once you read the Norton bio, and perhaps watch the video on Whitman on next week’s assignments, you’ll be able to put “Song of Myself” into a better context.
Until then, all I can say is that you might want to think of “Song of Myself” as a collage of images, people, stories, and thoughts. It jumps around from image to image, from thought to thought, as Whitman tries to capture the many and varied types of people that make up the American canvas. Worker and thinkers, women and men, children and adults. All the sounds of the streets of Manhattan that he walked most days of his life.
Section 8 begins not with a suicide but with a baby in its cradle. Then it jumps to a young boy and red-faced girl that Whitman views from atop a hill. THEN it moves on to a suicide. What unifies these 3 different scenes in this section is that the narrator (“I”) is observing each of these very different scenes.
Then we get the sounds and images of the streets of New York. And Whitman ends the section by saying, “I mind them or the show or resonance of them–I come and I depart.” So in this section he’s sharing with us birth, childhood, and death, the many stages of life, along with the many manifestations of daily life (e.g., snow sleighs, people throwing snowballs, adulterous offers made…). He shows us the beautiful, the mundane, the playful, and the ugly things that life is made up of, in his effort to share with us his observations about life and about America as a distinctly different place than the places all of its immigrants came from.