Do I Contradict Myself Very Well

From Section 51 of "Song of Myself" in Leaves of Grass, one of the poem's closing sections as Whitman prepares to dissolve into nature and leave the reader to continue alone. The lines address the objection that Whitman contradicts himself across the poem's vast catalogue of voices, attitudes, and sensory observations. His answer — "I am large, I contain multitudes" — is not evasion but philosophy: the self is not a fixed, consistent object but an ever-expanding field, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's remark that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" is its direct antecedent.