Song of Myself categorizes the concept of the American self as Whitman creates the conflict between the individual and the society encapsulating love, life, death, the material and the spiritual within one paradigm. He then reconciles the spiritual with the material and presents the union as the equalizing of individuals in society. Song of Myself" is one of the two strongly personal and autobiographical poems in Leaves of Grass. Writing during the mid-nineteenth century when the concept of democracy and individualism was creating a focus on the human aspect of progress., Whitman's poems allowed a reconciliation of the soul with the human experience. Using the...

In "Song of Myself" we see Whitman's tumble and mixture of private sensation and external universal experience that sharply contrasts to the Victorian stiffness of his day. His beliefs in equality, his optimistic faith in democracy, his frank approach to subjects that were not openly discussed, and his elevation of the position of women find plentiful examples in our own times.
At a time when the civil war in America had created unprecedented suffering and the slave issue had challenged the very concept of the self,…