You will prepare and submit a term paper on The Cultural Context in which Walt Whitman lived. Your paper should be a minimum of 1000 words in length.

You will prepare and submit a term paper on The Cultural Context in which Walt Whitman lived. Your paper should be a minimum of 1000 words in length. One of the interesting tensions that exists in the 'Song of Myself', are the boundaries that are drawn between his actual self and the self that is being sung about, so to speak When one isolates some of the better known passages, like the opening line itself: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” [Whitman 29], one gets the sense that Whitman was an individual with a tremendous ego. If one assumed that the poem itself was about his self, they would be mislead as it is a pastiche of all humanity in some regards. While the work begins with a focus posited on his self or 'myself', it gradually transforms into an elegiac look at almost all facets of society.