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Poetic Persona and Whitman’s “Song of Myself” 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