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Although the speaker doesn’t explicitly say it, “Song of Myself” is set in the United States of America in the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most obvious indicator of the setting is the speaker’s brief self-identification with the poet: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son” (line 497). Whitman’s presence in the poem implicitly locates the text in nineteenth-century America. However, many other contextual references clearly reflect the poem’s setting in this particular time and place. For instance, although the speaker mentions many different place names from around the world—and even “the heaven and the stars” (line 791)—most place names come from the U.S. The speaker also refers to “Yankees” as well as to Northerners and Southerners, a distinction that continues today but which was particularly potent in the nineteenth century. The poem’s rootedness in the United States may help to explain the exuberant spirit of liberty and individualism that guides the speaker’s wide-ranging vision. Virtually every aspect of the poem displays a lack of constraint and a freedom of expression that is characteristic of the nineteenth-century American ethos.

Next section Themes

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