Whitman’s private life was not one that would have been considered acceptable by his contemporary society. His Poetry was riddled with homosexual themes, though he hid them well. In his poetry Walt Whitman mind is exposed. Song of Myself is Walt’s way of turning the parts of himself that were the most unacceptable and creating something that seems beautiful. I think it goes without
Walt Whitman’s work was completely unique when he came out with Leaves of Grass in 1874. It spoke to new people, regular people. Most of the American poets that had come before Walt Whitman wrote primarily for the upper class. Whitman wrote poems that celebrated all individuals in American society. He didn’t just write for the educated and the rich, but for the poor and all in between. In a literary criticism published by the Southern Review, W. D. Snodgrass writes of how Whitman meant for Leaves of grass to be a “new bible” that would unify all Americans, help them understand what it meant to be an individual, and to tell them how to achieve it.
Whitman’s audience and philosophies of life weren’t the only things unique about him. He also had an outrageously different style from any of his contemporaries or predecessors. In Song of Myself Whitman’s celebration of the individual is complete when he communicates his ideas in the unique style of free verse. In Walt Whitman, the making of the poet, author Paul Zweig Writes that the reason people were so captivated by Whitman was that he wrote as if literature did not even exist. He was determined to keep his work free from any literary allusions or clichés, or even allusions to other poets.
Walt Whitman’s idea of being an individual is summed up by W.D. Snodgrass as “a philosophy of inclusion and expansion.” Whitman had the idea that after the cruel separation from the mother at birth, life is a sort of journey to find inclusion. This idea is reflectected in many of the events from Whitman’s life. Whitman probably saw promiscuous homosexual relationships as a means to his lofty goal of inclusion. In the poem Song of myself there is the continuous theme of a present bearing lover.
Song of Myself tells a story of the journey of self expansion made by the poet. Throughout the poem the poet’s experiences add up and are assimilated into his identity. Snodgrass describes Whitman’s concept of self as the “container of all.” The important thing in the journey taken in Song of Myself is the not the destination, but the experiences along the way. These are what give a person their identity. Snodgrass points out the “journey outward from the self.” Throughout the poet’s journey we see a growth that begins at the self, but by part 24, Whitman has become a landscape. Just after that Whitman grows even larger to become the size of a continent and finally in the end there is the recognition of death with the return of the poet to the mother of the sea.
Whitman saw no separation between the individual and the universe. In his critique of Whitman’s work, V.K. Chari believed that the self was the “organizing principle” of his poetry. Chari said that Whitman’s view of the self was, “the true meaning and center of all existence, and that reality was not separate or different from the self.” Killingsworth points out the dual nature of Whitman’s concept of self, that being the “tension between singularity and diversity.”