Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"

In addition, all of his writings center on America and the American experience. Drum Taps, for instance, concerns itself nigh exclusively with the American Civil War and even the precise title of his books of essays, Democratic Vistas, suggest American themes. Finally, the language apply in poetry of Myself sounds like American English (as clean-cut from British English) and, as the introductory essay points out, includes familiar American colloquialisms and, at times, even slang (Knox et al., 1992).

For me, however, the best way to testify Whitman's indisputably American sensibility is to actually quote directly from his poems. In section 16 of Song of Myself, for example, he indicates his identification with the great unwashed from e very(prenominal) part of America. He writes:

I am grizzly and young, of the foolish as much as the wise? A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter free-and-easy and hospitable? a Yankee? a Kentuckian waking the vale of the Elkhorn in my deer-skin leggings, a Louisianian or Georgian? a Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye." afterwards in that same section, he writes, "At home on the hills of Vermont or in t

As for Walt Whitman's inimitably personal sensibility, consider that his point of view is forever personal, that is, the point of view of the work is always his own. Indeed, even the title, Song of Myself, shows this.

Over and over again in the work, we find the wrangling "myself," "me," "my," and, perhaps most of all, the almost ubiquitous use of the pronoun "I". Indeed, consider also that the very first word of the very first line of the very first poem begins with "I" and that three out of the six words in the line argon self referential: "I celebrate myself and blether myself." At times, for emphasis, such as in section he even capitalizes the word "me" to give emphasis to himself: "But they are not the Me myself" In section 51 of the poem, we read his notable and personally revealing lines that perhaps more than any show that Whitman viewed himself as the center of his own universe: "Do I negate myself: Very well then I contradict myself.(I am large, I contain multitudes.)" (Knox et al., 1992).

e woods of Maine, or the Texas ranch, comrade of Californians, comrade of free North-Westerners (Whitman).

Whitman, W. (1936).
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