Song of Myself
Fifty-two sections of long unrhymed lines that start with a man loafing on the grass celebrating himself, then open outward into catalogues of trappers, runaway slaves, prostitutes, carpenters, the dying and the newly born, every one of them claimed as part of the same body. A child asks what the grass is, and the answer runs through graves, ordinary labor, sexual frankness, and a speaker who declines to be consistent because he contains multitudes. The founding poem of American verse and the source of free verse as an English-language tradition.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ The Song of Songs
- ↓ The Negro Speaks of Rivers
- ↓ Canto General
- ↓ Poet in New York
- ↓ Maritime Ode
Attributes
Genre
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 51% · 11 shared
- 51% · 9 shared
- 48% · 11 shared
- 48% · 10 shared
- 48% · 10 shared
- 48% · 9 shared