“Song of Myself” keeps shifting from moments of narration to moments of what we might call data ingestion. 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. 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.

Run boy run the sun will be guiding you