Analysis Of Walt Whitman's Song Of Myself

Although Whitman’s arguably most famous poem is entitled “Song of Myself,” it speaks of more than just the poetic “Walt Whitman” identified early in the poem. Rather, Walt Whitman expands his subject in order to talk about things greater than himself and about his ideal America, one that is unified and free. In Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” he defines his ideal America through his decision to speak not only about the relationship between people and nature, but about lowliest in American society at his time. By writing about people such as the middle class worker, slaves, and freed African Americans, he is able to write about subjects that were not the normal poetic subject at the time. The universal unity of every person and nature is one of
In following the tradition of the Romantic and Transcendental artists who had come before him, Whitman’s depiction of nature greatly differed from previous depictionsRather than focusing on nature’s influence on man’s emotions, his poetry describes the reciprocal relationship shared between humanity and nature, as well as the euphoric feeling experienced while being in nature. Through his interactions with Nature, Whitman’s speaker is not simply inspired by Nature, but is in an eternal relationship with Nature. He recognizes the properties of nature and is able to separate them from the artificial, as seen in Section 2 of “Song of Myself” when he says “The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, / It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, / I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,/ I am mad for it to be in contact with me” (17-20). Rather than being swayed by an artificial, “perfumed” version of nature, Whitman’s speaker finds his satisfaction by being in the presence of nature in its rawest forms. In the same way, the speaker is consequently encouraged to present his truest self as