experience with them. The first stanza serves as a declaration of what is to come—a shared experience between the poet and the reader, or everyone in this universe who shares the common "atom" of being.

Whitman’s poetry celebrates both the individual and the collective. “Song of Myself” could just as easily been called “Song of Ourselves,” because Whitman sees “himself” as a kind of microcosm of everyone else. When he writes, in the first lines of the poem, “And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” he is being characteristically direct about his sensibility. Whitman asserts that his reader will “assume” or believe what he assumes, not because Whitman is a powerful orator or gifted poet, but because he shares a commonality with all people on an atomic level. It‘s easy to think of that contention as hyperbole, but Whitman really means it. The spiritual unity implied by the word “assume” is in parallel to—and equal to—the physical unity implied by the word “atom.” His poem will describe that unity.

The opening lines of the poem celebrate the individual as well as the community to which he belongs—in “celebrating” himself, he celbrates “you” because all human beings are bound by their beautiful humanity.  The speaker celebrates all aspects of himself, good and bad, and claims the right to “loafe” so that he might invite his soul to participate in nature—to “observe a piece of grass.”  The poem was ground breaking for many reasons, one being a radical change in language that embraces a common vernacular, the bodily and quotidian aspects of life, and the earth as part of the experience of being human