Walt Whitman is revered as a one of the great contributors to the American body of literature despite the fact that he was not all that well-received by the average American of his time. Whitman constantly asserts what he believes to be a pattern of life, death, and rebirth in the universe. Death holds no terror for him, because he believes that it leads only to rebirth as part of an unending cycle. Such an attitude allows Whitman to honor the common man. He sees him as a noble part of humanity; and he finds no one, regardless of occupation or condition, unworthy of being saluted in his poetry. As far as Whitman was concerned, all people, but more specifically, all Americans share a commonality of thought, emotion, and intuitiveness . . . Americans, he would argue, even more than most. In a number of ways, Whitman appears to believe that the simple commonality of sharing American soil was enough to join Americans as Americans, regardless of race or ideology.

Such thinking is what Whitman uses to base the poetic persona he creates in “Song of Myself.” Throughout “Song,” Whitman graphically indicates how he has become extraordinarily troubled by doubts as to his

mission in life and his capacity to fulfill it. That demonstration of self-doubt adds to the body of evidence pointing to his ability to present his own fallibility as a characteristic shared by all

Obviously, every individual is following his or her own path but along that path he or she calls out to others to join in the journey. There is a “purpose and a place” for all people but it is equally true that any individual must have the courage and conviction to follow the right path. In this, Whitman assures the reader that what Americans have in common has nothing to do, at the most fundamental of levels, with country of origin but rather as the common bounds of the human species. It would appear, in "Song of Myself" that Whitman believes that a human being's individuality or unique background has little to do with the essence of who he or she is in context of their soul and their shared humanity.

Whitman concludes "Song of Myself" with a deceptively simple statement: “Missing me one place search another/ I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Once last time in the poem, he asserts that he is who he is and should somebody miss him in one place he may be in another. Perhaps the point he was making, in that statement and

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