Reading questions for Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”  Read all the way through the sections of the poems before trying to answer the questions.  Answers will come from the entire section, not necessarily just from one specific line or two.

Sections 1-7:

1.   How would you describe the persona of this poem? What things seem important to him, what does he enjoy?
 
 

2.  What is the mood of the first two stanzas?  What words give you this sense?
 
 

3.  How does the speaker of the poem feel about schools and other institutions?  What does this tell us about the speaker of the poem?  What does he want from the readers of the poem?
 
 

4.  How does the speaker of the poem feel about nature?  What does he have to say about nature and the natural world?  What does it offer us?
 
 

5.  How does the speaker see himself in relation to the people around him?  Is he completely a part of the crowd? Completely separate from it?
 

6.  To whom is the poet speaking in section 5, do you think?  What is the mood of this section?
 
 

7.   What are the qualities of grass that the poet admires?  How does this section help to explain why Whitman titled the entire book Leaves of Grass?  What is he suggesting, perhaps, about his poetry?
 
 

8.  What does he mean when he says that he is “not contain’d between my hat and my boots”? How does this image connect to other ideas he has introduced in the poem?
 
 

Stanzas 16-17

8.  What sorts of details does the speaker include in section 16?  What does he say he will do with all these details and with the lives of people he sees?
 
 
 

9. How would you describe the speaker’s attitude towards the country and the people in it? What connections can you make between this attitude and what Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass?
 
 

Sections 21-24:

10.  How does the poet describe himself, in these sections?  What are his tasks, as poet?
 
 

11.   What is the poet’s attitude towards time?
 

12.  What might the poet mean when he says “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son”?  How does this description fit with other things the poet has said?
 
 

13.  What are the poet’s attitudes towards sex? towards the body and physicality, generally?
 

Sections 46-52:

14. What is the “perpetual journey” the poet refers to?  Why does he say that people must travel their own road?
 
 

15.  What does it mean to be a “bold swimmer”?   Is it purely a literal statement?
 
 

16.  What sort of teacher is the poet?  What lessons is he trying to teach us?
 
 

17. What does he mean when he says that “I act as the tongue of you,/Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d”?
 
 

18.   What does he mean when he says that he will “never translate myself at all”?
 
 
 

19.  What is the poet’s attitude towards Death?  towards Life?
 
 

20.  Do contradictions appear to matter to the poet?  Why or why not?
 
 

21.  Why might the poet call his voice a “barbaric yawp”?
 
 

22.  Why would the poet say that we should look for him under our boot-soles?