Reading Notes W 8: Whitman:Song of myself, Part B

These notes are on Walt Whitman's poem "Song Of Myself" but first a bit of his background. The young Whitman grew up among Deists and Quakers, creeds that favored aninternal spirituality over  formal religious doctrines. He also worked odd jobs in his youth as a printer then later as a school teacher, builder, bookstore owner, journalist, and poet. Whitman always loved the theater, and he deliberately adopted many voices and persona's in his poetry. He saw regular speech as the best source for his poetry. through out his poem he has three main points he talks about. The first is the idea of the self. The second is the identification of the self with other selves. The last is the his relationship with the elements of nature and the universe. a lot in this poem comes off as a very spiritual and how he sees himself in the world. Whitman wishes to maintain the identity of his individual self while at the same time he desires to merge it with the universal self. This was Whitman's way of expressing to people of how he sees the world as a whole and him as an individuals and how those two work together and separately. This poem was a bit different than the others I have read because he was talking about a big picture subject.