Whitman goes on to insist that, if “Song of Myself” is to be successful, it has to actually and fully enter your mind, to read as if you yourself are thinking the thoughts that the poet is expressing. That is the nature of poetry-to make us suddenly aware of something we knew at some level before but only now have experienced it in language. Now he offers a simple and straightforward claim: everything he has said in the poem up to this point is “not original with me” but rather has been thought by “all men in all ages and lands.” What is original with him is the articulation of these commonplace thoughts: we all have thought these things, but only the poet expresses them. In this very brief section, Whitman continues the contraction of his poem from the long catalogue two sections earlier.
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