Editing Song of Myself (section)

==Literary style==
[[File:Quadroon type at Ponce, Porto Rico.jpg|alt=A dark-skinned woman in a light dress standing against a wall|thumb|"Song of Myself" includes passages about the unsavory realities of the United States before the Civil War, including one about a multi-racial slave]]
The poem is written in Whitman's signature [[free verse]] style. Whitman, who praises words "as simple as grass" (section 39) forgoes standard verse and [[stanza]] patterns in favor of a simple, legible style that can appeal to a mass audience.<ref>Redding, Patrick. "Whitman Unbound: Democracy and Poetic Form". ''New Literary Theory'' 41.3 (2010): 669-90. ''Project Muse''. Web. 19 October 2011.</ref>

Critics have noted a strong [[Transcendentalism|Transcendentalist]] influence on the poem. In section 32, for instance, Whitman expresses a desire to "live amongst the animals" and to find divinity in the insects.

In addition to this [[romanticism]], the poem seems to anticipate a kind of [[realism (arts)|realism]] that would only become important in [[United States]] literature after the [[American Civil War]]. In the following 1855 passage, for example, one can see Whitman's inclusion of the gritty details of everyday life:<blockquote>The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case,<br>
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bed-room;)<br>
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,<br>
He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;<br>
The malform'd limbs are tied to the surgeon's table,<br>
What is removed drops horribly in a pail;<br>
The [[quadroon]] girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove, ... (section 15)
</blockquote>