FOREWORD TO WALT WHITMAN:
SONG OF MYSELF

“Song of Myself” is by far the greatest poem ever written by an American. At each rereading I feel exhilarated, as if for the first time, by its freshness and breadth of vision, its bodiliness, its high spirits, its astonishing empathy, by the freedom and goofiness and dignity of its language, and, not least, by its spiritual insight. It is a miracle of a poem.

But a pocket edition? To shrink this expansive, world-swallowing language even to the size of a normal book is a bit absurd. (The first edition measures eight inches by eleven, and its lines seem to go on for miles.) Still, I think Whitman would have been touched at the prospect of being carried around in the breast or hip pockets of young men and women, intimately, close to the flesh.

A few words about the text presented here. Whitman’s vision and his language were at their most powerful in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855. As he grew older, his insight faded, and with it the vivacity of his words. Yet in each successive edition he kept tinkering with “Song of Myself” and the other early poems — adding, deleting, revising. And while certain of these revisions are excellent, most are disastrous. This has led to affectionate frustration among some of Whitman’s readers; we want the best of all possible editions.

For example, in a passionate and deservedly famous passage about music the text of the 1855 edition reads:

I hear the violincello or man’s heart’s complaint,
And hear the keyed cornet or else the echo of sunset.

I hear the chorus . . . . it is a grand-opera . . . . this indeed
     is music!

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,
The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the trained soprano . . . . she convulses me like the climax
     of my love-grip;
The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,
It wrenches unnamable ardors from my breast,
It throbs me to gulps of the farthest down horror,
It sails me . . . . I dab with bare feet . . . . they are licked by
     the indolent waves,
I am exposed . . . . cut by bitter and poisoned hail,
Steeped amid honeyed morphine . . . . my windpipe squeezed in
     the fakes of death,
Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.

Whitman incorporated two brilliant revisions in the second (1856) edition. There, line two reads:

I hear the keyed cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears, it
     shakes mad-sweet pangs
through my belly and breast.

And line eight:

It wrenches such ardors from me, I did not know I possessed them

In 1860 he rewrote the transition from lines twelve to thirteen in this way:

          my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,
At length let up again to feel