SEARCHING FOR WHOLENESS, OR DIVINITY
The passage “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then, I contradict myself. / I am large, I contain multitudes.”, from section 51 of “Song of Myself”, is a true picture of Whitman and the Leaves. For the author as well as the book contain multitudes. “Multitudes” means a great number of things or people, the masses, the populace, hosts, legions, armies, or even multiple points of view, as in the expression “a multitude of reasons”. A reader may be even puzzled by the Leaves for many years, feeling confused by not comprehending its messages, and considering himself unintelligent for not being able to capture the totality of the work or to grasp its open or hidden meanings.
However, when this reader finds words like: “Except for Dickinson (the only American poet comparable to him in magnitude), there is no other nineteenth-century poet as difficult and hermetic as Whitman [...]“, and “Only an elite can read Whitman, despite the poet’s insistence that he wrote for the people [...]“, written by Bloom (1985, p.3), he understands that he needs more than a superficial comprehension of the book to really walk down these leafy roads.
The poet was not easy to be understood; although he was acquainted with people of all ranks, he preferred to be with the common men, as he called himself “one of the roughs”(BLOOM, 1985, p.2), someone who enjoyed being with the common people on ferries and buses, as he truly confesses in this poem, “To the Prevailing Bards”, from “Uncollected Poems”:
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