y losses for having that belief; however, as is shown in his literature, Whitman stood by his views with out falter.The last twenty years of Whitman’s life were consumed with sickness and stress, but in that time he managed to publish three more editions of “Leaves of Grass”, the last one being termed the “deathbed” edition. His last releases went under a great deal of revisal and were by far his most popular; so sought after, in fact, that he was able to retire and buy a house in Camden, New Jersey (“Whitman, Walt” 639) . Whitman was a man who wrote his poetry without compromise and gave honest interpretations of what he thought to be true. From his poetry, readers are able to develop a great sense of freedom and integrity and avoid conforming due to the mass amounts of sameness among the rest of civilization. Through his writings, Whitman struggled with the rest of the world between the powers of “one’s self” and “em masse”, as he states in his poem, “One’s-Self I Sing”: “One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person, yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse (Whitman 1) .”...
