Walt Whitman, in Leaves of Grass, offers a celebration of life, death, and everything in between. Whitman writes almost literally about everything under the sun, although his primary subjects are humanity and nature. His poems are affirmations of the goodness and abundance of life on every level---physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual.
The style Whitman uses is almost Biblical in its rhythms and stateliness, but the poet does not mean to put himself above the reader in any way. Instead, he argues that all human beings are brothers and sisters together in the adventure of life, none superior to any other. His poems are idealistic and religious in the sense that he approves and praises everything in life and in the world, but especially the human being, spiritual and physical: "I am the poet of the body,/ And I am the poet of the soul" (Whitman 44).
On one level, the pieces in this volume are thoroughly American, and on another level, they are universal in their embrace of all things and creatures in the world. In the opening prose piece, Whitman focuses on the role of America in the world, especially in the spiritual or inspirational sense. He writes of the America which opens its arms to all peoples and all races in the world. In fact, he widens the definition of America to include all souls who have a poetic nature:
America does not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions . . . accepts the m=lesson with calmness. . . . The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest potential nature. The united States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. . . . The largeness of nature of the nation were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen. . . . The American poets are to include old and new for America is the race of races (Whitman 5-6).
We see in these lines ...