Mark Edmundson finds in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself the evolution of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Breaking from the past literature he saw as "feudal"--obsessed with the noble and great--Whitman created a story of commonplace egalitarian selfhood, a story he li...

Mark Edmundson finds in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself the evolution of a democratic spirit, for the individual and the nation. Breaking from the past literature he saw as "feudal"--obsessed with the noble and great--Whitman created a story of commonplace egalitarian selfhood, a story he lived as a hospital volunteer during the Civil War.