These cascading lines hint at the massiveness of the database that would comprise all of our sights and hearings and touches, each of which could be entered as a separate line of the poem. As we read this catalog, we can see how it indicates and imitates an endless database, and how it suggests a process that could continue for a lifetime.
#Blue spheres plus steam full
In one of those early notebooks, he enjoins himself: “ Data, all-comprehensive and to be pursued as far into details and to as full information as any one will.” He was an early practitioner of a genre we are increasingly familiar with: the database itself. His early notebooks and notes are full of lists of particulars-sights and sounds and names and activities-that he dutifully enters into his personal record. In by far the longest section of “Song of Myself,” Whitman now reminds us of how, for him, the world was a kind of pre-electronic database.
In Section 15, we experienced a seemingly endless “catalog” of images, but Section 33 makes that catalog seem modest by comparison.