Revisiting Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" : the poetics of human self and identity

Abstract EN

This paper explores the constituents of Walt Whitman's poetic self – soul and body; its hopes, tensions, expectations and concerns.

It focuses mainly on "Song of Myself1 " for it presents a web of references and implications to the poet's fragmented self and confused identity.

Whitman portrays his self as such in its human and universal context, expecting other selves to identify with his.

In its psychoanalytic ground, the paper also tries to shed light on the poetic anticipation that foreshadows the current hard situations that cause a lot of shocks, fragmentation, depression, uncertainty, and disappointment.

According to Whitman's poetics, the absence of stable selves, the loss of hopes and the confusion on place and time provide a ground for exploring human desires and hopes of having stable selves and integrated and identified identities.

This paper also studies the fusion between the self and identity as seen in the identification of the poet's self with other people's selves, in search for uniqueness, stability, and social and psychological mobility.