He emphasizes his materiality, his body that eats and drinks and breeds, carrying on from previous sections his insistence that soul and voice exist only when embodied, when given mass. And the name comes with an immediate emphasis on its local and universal connections-Walt Whitman is the “son” of New York but is in fact, like all of us, a “kosmos,” a self harmonious with the vast universe of which he knows he is an eternal part. The effect is that this nameless voice-this “I”-that has absorbed so much in the first twenty-three sections, can now take on an actual identity, since it has accumulated a sensory past. For readers of the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), where Whitman’s name did not appear on the cover or title page, this would have been the first indication of the who the author was. Now, twenty-four sections into “Song of Myself,” Whitman finally introduces himself by name.
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