I Celebrate Myself And Sing Myself

The opening lines of "Song of Myself," the central poem of Leaves of Grass (first published 1855). In the 1855 edition the poem was untitled; it received its current title in 1881. The declaration "I celebrate myself" was revolutionary in American poetry — an assertion of individual selfhood that simultaneously dissolved into universal selfhood ("every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you"). Whitman revised Leaves of Grass across nine editions over his lifetime, treating it as a continuously evolving life's work rather than a finished book.