Section 4, Song of Myself

The “talkers” and “discussers” now become the “trippers” and “askers,” those well-meaning people who occupy our days with talk of all the things that we often trick ourselves into believing actually form us—our childhood, our local environs, our dress, the latest news of wars, sickness, the stock market. These things do in some ways make up what we are, but there is something about each of us that goes far deeper.

Whitman shares with Henry David Thoreau this burning concern with the way life gets eaten up by trivialities, by what we learn to call “news.” “When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip,” Thoreau writes in “Life without Principle”: “We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.” Whitman, in this section of the poem, affirms his desire to hear from himself now, to access his “inward life,” what he calls “the Me myself.”

We are always surrounded by those who want to “pull and haul” us toward their own beliefs and concerns. The poet here tells us that he, too, wasted years trying to penetrate the “fog” of all the arguments of the “linguists and contenders”—those who use language to complicate life and divert our attention by getting us involved in the petty squabbles that occupy most people’s lives. Now, though, we are invited by the poet to contact the deeper area of ourselves that stands “apart” from these forces that are always trying to divert us from the self that matters.

Whitman here offers in words an image to match the engraving of the poet on the frontispiece of his first edition of Leaves of Grass, the poet in working-class garb, hat on, arm akimbo, fixing the reader with his penetrating gaze—a man who “Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,” one who “Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm . . . Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next.” The trick, Whitman says, is to figure out how to be “Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.” Unlike Thoreau, who sought his deeper self by removing himself from other humans, retreating to the wilderness, Whitman seeks the deeper self by carefully observing his urban surroundings, learning how to absorb it all while also standing apart from it, learning to “witness and wait,” to give himself time to see what is worth seeing. He will seek his “Me myself” not only in nature but in the multitudes of people he encounters daily, people who will challenge him to widen his sense of who he is.

—EF