Section 16, Song of Myself

Whitman’s mother once commented that Walt always seemed to be “going out and coming in.” She was referring to his peripatetic ways, but her description works as well for the structure of “Song of Myself,” where the poet expands out into the welter of details around him, testing how wide he can expand his sympathetic impulse before the self dissipates, and then he contracts back into a firm sense of self, expressing confidence that he can contain the multitudes he has absorbed, that they in fact strengthen the self. Section 16 is the contraction of the vast expansion of Section 15, where the random sampling of America took us up and down the social strata from a prostitute to the president, across the nation’s vast geography into the city and into the country and into the wilderness, through the diversity of occupations, and across races (with signs of America’s increasing racial mixture—the “quadroon girl” and the “half-breed”). His catalogue manages to create a remarkable sense of interpenetration: farmers farm and hunters hunt, and people eat the harvest and the kill; sewers sew and weavers weave, and we see the bridal gown and the regatta sails that are the results of their labor; the young become the old, the foolish the wise; everyone’s activities feed into every else’s, as we all move to the beat of the conductor, to the minute hand of the clock, as night and sleep eventually overtake us. And now, in Section 16, the poet pauses, contracts, absorbs all that he has seen and heard and felt, and uses it to formulate a definition of the self.

What had before seemed random and dispersed now comes to be the very weave of self-identity: “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,” the poet says, discovering all possible identities within himself. Each of us has within ourselves the potential to be anyone else; any identity the nation can generate could be ours, given slight shifts in where we were born, how wealthy our parents were, what dialects we were raised in, what religious views our parents held. So Whitman realizes he is “a Southerner soon as a Northerner,” because the divisions in our society are not the result of different souls but rather of different experiences. And if we can expand our experiences, absorb vastly different points of view, we can begin to overcome bias and see that in fact we are all in essence one pure human potential, with an infinite scatter of realizations: “Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion.”

A democratic imagination breaks through all the boundaries that divide us and allows us to see how our identities interrelate, lets us each see our individual self as every bit as diverse as the nation is: each of us is “one of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same.” So Whitman can finally make the most radical of his claims: “I resist anything better than my own diversity.” The only thing that he will fight against will be anything or anyone that teaches him discrimination, that urges him to be less, to be more narrow, than his democratic imagination would allow him to be. He will not be “stuck up” in the slang sense of “arrogant” or “self-important,” but also in the sense of “isolated,” above everyone else, stuck up in some privileged corner of existence. Rather, he will be “in his place,” which, just as a moth or a sun is in its place, is one unique place—occupied by nothing else—that is also, via the imagination, all places.