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What does the phrase "you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself" mean in Song of Myself?

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The phrase "you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself" in "Song of Myself" encourages individuals to value their own experiences over inherited knowledge or traditional authority. Whitman, aligning with Transcendentalist ideals, urges readers to engage with the world directly and authentically, rather than relying on secondhand interpretations. This approach emphasizes personal judgment and the importance of forming one's own understanding and perspective based on direct experience.

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In section 2 of "Song of Myself," Whitman is at pains to "belch" words. He wants poetry to become immediate, to "belch" forth, not simply function as a kind of prettified, stale tradition such as we get from books. As he writes in the lines directly before the one in question:

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Whitman's embrace of the concept of valuing one's own experience and reacting to the world in a fresh, immediate, unmediated way puts Whitman squarely in the Transcendentalist camp, along with people such as Emerson and Thoreau, who privileged experience over books or tradition.

Whitman is trying...

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to write a poem so immediate and raw that it is a different form of poetry, one that puts us more closely in touch with what is authentic. He models that in the first stanza of section two, with its heady, felt, intoxicated description:

Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the pass- ing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn ...

But in the second stanza, which we are focusing on, he admonishes readers not to accept his authority as better than their own or to look at the world the way he does: his poem, he is saying, should act more like a prompt pushing the reader to experience the universe for himself. When he says "You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self," he means all people should think and judge life—and Whitman's poem—for themselves, evaluating it on the basis of their own experience and own soul. Don't be afraid to be who you are.

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