hitman, in this "commodification," becomes inextricably melded to the persona of the subject Whitman in the poetry. As Mulcaire goes on to argue:(T)his book is not just the product of my body, he insists to us; this book is my body. The corollary of this radical intimacy is a radical alienation. Leaves of Grass can embody Walt Whitman to his public, it seems, only insofar as his body has undergone a process of alienation so thorough as to be fatal to any form of bodily existence independent of the commodified form of his book. (474) In essence Whitman's goal is to erase, or ignore, all boundaries, geographic, spiritual and temporal, in an effort to bring forth the true spirit of humanity (Egan 81). This search for, and communication of, the natural, caring and intimate human being guides the poetry of Walt Whitman. In converse the poetry reflects the pursuit of the human being. Like life and like nature, the verse is uneven and unrhymed. It is free. The poetry is the reflection of how Whitman sees the natural human being, unconstrained by the burdens of verse as the free human is independent of the mental handcuffs of society. He envisions himself, and his American society, as something that has the potential to break free and live. As he explicates in the first stanza of section 2, Whitman sees a spiritual undressing as a prerequisite to achieve consciousness: Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it, I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me (Section 2). The perfume in this passage is representative of the alienation of the self with the physical world. It is a mas...
