![]() ![]() Myself would never come after celebrate in normal talk or prose writing.Nobody ever says “I celebrate”: instead one says “I’m celebrating,” “I celebrate” sounds like someone making a speech on a formal occasion: “Today we celebrate the birthday of a great American.”.What’s peculiar about the way Whitman is talking? My college students find most of the oddities in the lines and, with a bit more help, I think younger students could also: I ask my students to pick out words and phrases they wouldn’t be likely to hear in conversation or to read in an essay or newspaper article. By looking closely at these words and uses, one may be able to get closer to the mystery of poetry, of Whitman’s in any case, to be inspired by “Song of Myself” and to write like it and to understand it. These things, of course, are the words and the ways Whitman puts them together. There must be other things about them that make them so interesting and suggestive and exciting to read. ![]() Whitman’s lines don’t rhyme and they have no regular meter. ![]() I myself am what I am celebrating and everything that I am, you are also, since you and I are both made out of the same materials I’m really taking it easy, lying around and communing with my soul, while I look at a blade of grass. If you put the thoughts expressed in these opening lines of “ Song of Myself” into ordinary speech, they are rather flat and uninteresting: I lean and loafe at my ease … observing a spear of summer grass. ![]() For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. ![]()
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