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Walt Whitman. Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary. Introduction and Commentary by Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. 193 pp.
"Novel?-Work of some sort / Play? . . . Plotfor a poem or other work... A spiritual novel?" In Ed Folsom's "Introduction" to Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary, Whitman demonstrates his attention to form during the creation of what we now know as "Song of Myself." Recent discoveries of Whitman's writings dating around 1855-a novel published in 1852, a health manual appearing in 1858-serve as reminders of the singularity of his choice to shape "Song of Myself" as poetry. The labels of "free form" or "open form" that the work often receives can belie the deliberateness and significance of its structure.
Though the poem's irregular stanzas appeared unnumbered and seemingly unorganized in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman originally conceived of it in five parts-as Folsom revealed in a study of a circa 1855 manuscript housed at the Harry Ransom Center ("Walt Whitman's Working Notes for the First Edition of Leaves of Grass," WWQR [Fall 1998]). No surprise, then, that Walt eventually began to organize the poem into sections, beginning with the numbering of 372 stanzas with the poem's third publication in 1860. In the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass, he reconfigured the poem into 366 stanzas and also partitioned it into 52 sections. This numbering remained in place in Leaves of Grass 1871, though he finally dropped the stanza numbers and only retained the 52 sections in the sixth and final editions of the Leaves, when the poem gained the title "Song of Myself." The constant rethinking of the poem's organization suggests that the numbering was more than simply a way to create order, as it is often understood. And the breakdown of 52 sections in the final iteration of "Song of Myself"-the version Whitman asks his readers to favor-must have been the most significant of all.
"Song of Myself" has, of course, been interpreted in myriad ways, as is conveniently evident in the "Selected Bibliography of Readings of Song of Myself" found in the final pages of this book. In his introduction, Folsom proposes that the "deep structure" of "Song of...