Previous Next

“Song of Myself” has an exuberant tone that expresses the speaker’s expansive sense of connection to all things in the universe. Virtually all aspects of the poem’s form and content reflect this sweeping exuberance. Perhaps most immediately obvious are the unconstrained lines. Although the poem’s verses vary in length between three and thirty words, the vast majority clock in around fifteen and often overflow the bounds of a single line of printed text. With wry self-awareness, the speaker makes note of his “omnivorous lines” and insists that he “must not write any less” (line 1084). He clearly has a lot to say and refuses to censor himself. In line with this refusal are the epic lists the speaker makes throughout the poem. These lists catalog the wide range of people, animals, sounds, and events that populate his world and hence co-constitute his sense of self. Furthermore, to amplify the rhetorical effects of these lists, the speaker often uses anaphora (ann-AF-uh-ruh), which involves the repetition of a word or phrase in consecutive sentences or clauses. Taken together, these rhetorical tactics exhibit the speaker’s exuberant drive to express an all-encompassing sense of the self’s connection to the universe.

Previous section Symbols Next section Structure

Take a Study Break