As he describes it, he becomes 'multitudes.' He encompasses both the basest desires of the human flesh and the loftiest visions of the human soul. In 'Song of Myself,' Whitman is creating his own poetic world and he is creating himself as a character within that world. Instead, Whitman becomes the quintessential modern man, created through nature and created through his own journey of self discovery. Whitman does not call on religious methods or traditional institutions to help create his self. It is one of the book's original poems, appearing in the first 1855 edition although it did not take its final form until the 1881 edition. 'Song of Myself' is a celebration of the individual. His own soul is named as a character in the book and his poems, he says, are written with the soul in mind. Whitman, however, is not just concerned with the physical but with the spiritual as well. His poems are of these people and for these people. Whitman intends here to name those that will accompany him on his journey and he catalogs a vast list of people and places that will play a part in his travels. Whitman understands the entire book as a journey and so he begins with his own beginnings of self-awareness and poetic inspiration as a boy on Long Island, New York.

'Starting from Paumanok' is a kind of road map for the literary work ahead. He writes poems of a political, social, personal, and sexual nature, all ideas that he will elaborate on in later sections. The themes of 'Inscriptions' are as varied as the themes of the entire book. The subject, then, is Whitman, the reader, and the nation. Whitman names the subject of the work - 'One's-self.' This is not only Whitman's self, though he certainly identifies himself as the hero of the epic, but it is also the reader's self as well as a more encompassing democratic self. The opening section, 'Inscriptions,' gives the reader an overview of the work and the purview of its author. He desired that the reader would see a self formed through the words and themes of the book. Instead, he was concerned with the journey of the poetry. Whitman was intentional in not organizing the book in any chronological way. Whitman revised and added to the book throughout his life, the final edition being published only months before his death in 1891. Leaves of Grass is a collection of poetry written over Walt Whitman's entire lifetime organized thematically into sections.

Leaves of grass poem text