Whitman's epic poem is rife with contradictions, inconsistencies, and paradoxes. It is a constant struggle between which part of identity is inherent and which part comes from the outside influences. Which perspectives are your own and which are imposed on you from this world outside of your own thought?
In part 4 of "Songs of Myself", he lists rapidly events that are considered to have an impact on a person:"discoveries, inventions, societies" or "the sickness of one of my folk" and he determines that these events are detached from him, "they are not the Me myself." He brings up all of the life events, small and large that seemingly impact one's person and yet he is separate from him. "These come to [him] day and night and go from [him] again." They are too fleeting for him to harness to be apart of him; he cannot integrate these events into himself. He is impartial. There is a sense of this "in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it"but there is no integration of his thought and his self with the impact of scientific discoveries, unrequited love, and horrific battles (of the Civil War).The world enters him and he enters the world but there is no mutual interaction, he is complacent. He is submerged, yet separate, like a biological entity with a highly selective cell wall that processes all of the information that comes to it but turns most alien subject out. It is almost an inhuman, mechanical way of living. There is no emotion to this described-self that has "no mocking or arguments, witness[ing] and wait[ing]." It leaves one wanting emotion, a response, something human to grasp onto.
In part 16 of "Songs of Myself", there is more of an acceptance of influence of the material world on identity. There is a focus especially on the identity as an American, and as he lived through the Civil War, there is a start on the association of being both a Southerner and a Northerner. He is at home as a "Yankee," as a "Kentuckian," Louisianian," or "Georgian", as a "Hoosier, Badger, Buckeye", or in Vermont, Maine, Texas, or California. He hits every region of the U.S. He is at home everywhere and yet I feel as if he is at home no-where. He belongs everywhere and is everything and yet he lacks an identity. There is no way to pin his sense-of-self down and so he just floats away in this immense diversity. He also is of every profession and categorization of a person, "a farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, quaker, Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, priest." It is an impossibility as we think it to be all of these things at once and this paradox is to illuminate the problems of categorization. A human cannot be labeled and stereotyped. Labels and imposed-identities are over-whelming, leading to a crisis, as he demonstrates, where a sense of self is lost amongst the lists of labels. But at the end is where there is a sense of positivity comes in when he accepts the diversity, but without labels, this idea that "everything is in its place," including himself. There is a sense of acceptance with the unknown, a comfort. "The bright suns [he] see[s] and the dark sun[s] [he] cannot see are in their place" and also "the palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place." The things he knows and the things he cannot know, that are out of his range are all where they belong, even the contradictions in self and the inconsistencies are accepted, but not in a Candide-esque way, he is more explorative than Candide, who accepts things as they are given to him. As he made clear in section 4, Whitman does not accept all things through his cell walls, he is a very selective creature, he came to this notion of things being in their place through his own exploration.
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