Song of Myself Pt 2 by Walt Whitman ( Sections 30-52) read by A Poetry Channel

Walt Whitman's Song of Myself continued.... If you enjoy watching my readings and would like to give my channel a little further support, you can buy me a coffee here:
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Song of Myself was included in Walt Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass. Whitman paid for the publication of the first edition himself. Astonishing how many of our greatest poets were self-published. Whitman wrote Song of Myself in 1855, but in the first edition, it had no name and in the second edition, he titled it simply 'Walt Whitman', then later called it 'Poem of Walt Whitman, an American' for a while, and it really wasn't until the end of his life that he gave it the title we all know and love. The poem's frank depictions of sexuality and eroticism earned it a somewhat scandalous reputation. Whitman's contemporary, the equally influential poet Emily Dickinson, wrote about Whitman in one her letters, saying: "You speak of Mr. Whitman. I never read his book, but was told it was disgraceful." Whitman made several changes to the text throughout his lifetime, altering phrases here and there to reflect different phases in his own life. When Whitman became more famous later in his career, he edited out some of the juiciest bits of "Song of Myself".

Song of Myself has influenced almost every major American poet of the 20th century, including T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and John Ashbery.
Whitman's choice to write the poem in extended free verse instead of a more traditional rhyme scheme was considered radical in the mid-19th century, people didn't quite know how to deal with free verse and basically derided it or 50 years. Then about 1911-12, the young Modernist poets started to experiment with the form which they thought of as not an American thing coming out of Whitman but as an avant-garde technique coming out of France. ... It really wasn't until Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl that somebody took what Whitman had done and tried to do something more with it.