ABSTRACT
Emerson would have had to read no farther than the first page or so of the strange anonymous book he received in the mail, sent him, he could only suppose, by the unknown author himself, to realize that the writer was expressing some of his own central thoughts, sometimes in the same images. Here was a man neither timid nor apologetic, who dared to say “I am,” even “I celebrate myself.” Here was a man unashamed before a blade of grass. The first lines he read in the 1855 edition, the opening lines of a poem finally called “Song of Myself,” were these: I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease. … observing a spear of summer grass.
