Galway Kinnell, for example, argues that the poet’s creative and critical faculties weakened as he grew older, and “the more he searched for perfection, the farther away it went.” But who can blame Whitman for such a quest? Like a scientist who makes a discovery, which alters our understanding of the universe, and then spends the rest of his life refining the implications of his breakthrough, the poet tinkered with his work.

The revisions that Whitman made to “Song of Myself” between its first publication in 1855 and the deathbed edition of 1891 continue to unsettle some readers.

Whitman here captures not only a different aspect of life in America, but a different pace in the rural areas of the country, more leisurely and peaceful than the noisy staccato urban catalog that came just before. In his autobiography, Specimen Days, Whitman recalls as a boy how he had “often been out on the edges of these plains toward sundown, and can yet recall in fancy the interminable cow-processions, and hear the music of the tin or copper bells clanking far or near, and breathe the cool of the sweet and slightly aromatic evening air, and note the sunset.” In this section of “Song of Myself,” Whitman offers a closely observed visual poem, a kind of pre-imagist intensely focused moment, as he imagines or recalls riding on a hay wagon toward the open doors of “the country barn,” feeling the jolt of the wagon, and then jumping down into “the clover and timothy” (the grass with flower spikes cultivated for hay), immersing himself in the fall grass, feeling himself in a tangle with it. In this, one of the shortest sections of “Song of Myself” (only two other sections have eight lines, as this section does, and only one section has fewer lines), Whitman turns from the city to the country, from the urban to the rural, as he perhaps recalls his own early childhood memories on his family’s Long Island farm (his family moved from the farm to Brooklyn just days before Whitman turned four) and his later visits to his grandparents’ farm nearby.

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