Tom Phillips described Song of Myself as “an attempt to list the various identities that go to make a single artistic life”. The work borrows its title from a poem in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Its beginning is based on the confessional Anglo-Saxon poem, The Seafarer, which Phillips first came across as an undergraduate at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Within the work, the alert reader will find further references, direct or cryptic, to Homer, Plato, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Marvell, Conrad, R. L. Stevenson; to the music of Wagner and Robert Schumann; and to the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. The text is littered with echoes of Phillips’s own artistic preoccupations: as a painter, calligrapher, user of stencils and maker of books.

Phillips first made a pencil drawing of the text, then worked with the fabricator Leo Verryt to realise the work in wire, as a hanging poem. Other versions of the text exist, one in a series of paintings called Curriculum Vitae (No XX, 1992), and another in Self Portrait in Silver (2004). Phillips writes: “The unity of the piece in which letters are tortured into cooperation hopes to reflect an overall homogeneity in the spirit of its maker”.

The Bodleian Libraries also has the Tom Phillips archive in our collection.