Selected Poems by Whitman

I contain multitudes, Walt Whitman says in his great poem Song of Myself, and this multitudinousness, expressed with a genius for language and an imaginative energy as powerful as that possessed by any writer, has come to define the inner meaning - the mystic idea - of the American experience. Though he himself lived most of his life in and around New York City, Whitman's poetry encompassed the sweep of a continent.