What this quote means

On the surface, this passage — drawn from Section 51 of “Song of Myself,” the final and most celebrated poem in Leaves of Grass — is Whitman’s direct, unapologetic response to the charge of self-contradiction. He asks the question himself: “Do I contradict myself?” — and answers with breezy, almost gleeful confidence: “Very well then I contradict myself.” Rather than mounting a defence or offering explanations, he simply embraces the inconsistency. The last line delivers the full force of the argument: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

The deeper truth here is a radical declaration of human complexity. At a time when nineteenth-century society — and especially its literature — prized moral consistency and rational orderliness, Whitman insisted that the human soul is not a narrow, predictable thing. To contain multitudes is to hold within yourself all the contradictions of lived experience: joy and grief, certainty and doubt, compassion and anger, faith and skepticism. The quote refuses the false choice between one version of yourself and another. It says: you need not pick. You are all of it. This is perhaps the most liberating idea in all of American poetry.

When Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, the literary establishment was baffled and often hostile. The book had no clear precedent — it was not epic poetry, not proper Victorian lyric verse. It spoke openly about the body, democracy, and the working class in ways that scandalized polite society. “Song of Myself” is the collection’s enormous centrepiece: a sprawling, ecstatic 52-section poem in which the speaker — “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” — identifies himself with every human being, every creature, every atom of the universe. The lines where this quote appears are his final, defiant send-off. He is not going to explain himself to critics; he is going to dissolve into the world and invite the reader to follow.

Today, in an age of social media where consistency of personal “brand” is constantly demanded — where people are expected to hold fixed opinions, never evolve, never change their minds — Whitman’s words cut with particular force. We are expected to be legible: to fit a category, maintain a coherent identity, never contradict our past selves. This quote is a reminder that contradiction is not weakness. It is the signature of a genuinely lived life, a mind still growing. Every person who has ever evolved in their thinking, or simply held two truths at once, will find permission in Whitman’s voice.

About Walt Whitman

Walter Whitman Jr. was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, on Long Island, New York, into a large family of modest means. His father was a farmer and carpenter; his mother, Louisa Van Velsor, came from a Dutch Quaker family known for warmth and good humour. Whitman left school at eleven to help support the family, working successively as an office boy, a printer’s apprentice, a schoolteacher, and eventually a journalist and newspaper editor. Through voracious self-education in Brooklyn’s libraries and bookshops, he absorbed Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, the King James Bible, and the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson — texts that would echo through every line of his mature poetry.

Whitman’s masterwork, Leaves of Grass, first appeared in 1855 as a slender, self-published volume of twelve untitled poems. Over the next four decades he revised and expanded it continuously through nine editions — a lifelong act of self-reinvention that mirrored the very theme of his greatest quote. He is today universally called the “father of free verse,” having abandoned the strictures of formal meter and rhyme in favour of long, muscular, biblical lines that matched the sprawl and democracy of the American experience. Ralph Waldo Emerson, upon receiving a copy, wrote to Whitman that he found it “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.” His influence on American and world literature — from Allen Ginsberg and Langston Hughes to Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca — is incalculable.

During the Civil War, Whitman served as a volunteer nurse in Washington D.C. military hospitals, visiting and comforting tens of thousands of wounded soldiers at his own expense. The experience transformed both the man and the poet, producing his haunting elegies for Lincoln (“O Captain! My Captain!”) and the deeply humane war poems collected in Drum-Taps (1865). In later life, partially paralyzed by a stroke, Whitman continued to write and receive literary admirers from around the world at his modest home in Camden, New Jersey. He died on March 26, 1892, at age 72, and was buried in a tomb he had personally designed — as characteristically grand and self-made as everything else about him.

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