I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy. ("Song of Myself," 1892 edition, I)

Basic set up:

This is the beginning of Whitman's uber-famous poem, "Song of Myself."

That Walt Whitman is really into himself. It takes a lot of ego to write a poem celebrating how wonderful we are. And yet that's exactly what Whitman is doing in this poem. This celebration of himself reflects the American Romantics' obsession with individualism. These writers really believed that each and every one of us was a special snowflake, and that we should shout that fact from the mountaintops.

And yet, on another level, these lines from the poem also show how we're all connected. As the poet states, "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." So we're individual, and we are all different, but we should also never lose sight of how we are connected to others, just as the speaker in the lines above is conscious of how he is connected to his parents, and his parents' parents before that.

The language of this poem is pretty simple. What's more, it's written in "free verse," meaning that Whitman is not sticking to any regular form or meter. This was unusual for the time: poetry, at the time that Whitman was writing, was still very constrained by metrical and formal rules.

In fact, Whitman's use of free verse was pretty revolutionary because it broke with tradition. This is not unusual for the American Romantics. Whitman, and other Romantics, wanted to break free from the conventions of literary form and especially from the conventions that they had inherited from European literature.

They were, after all, trying to create a whole new American literature. Why should the rebellion against the old ways stop with the American Revolution?