He is, even more than Emerson or Thoreau, the American Scholar that Emerson called for. His greatest achievement was his ability to successfully combine the American quality individualism with democracy. Leaves of Grass is a true American epic poem. Walt Whitman begins his 1891 version of this masterpiece with the small poem, Inscriptions: One's Self I Sing; this is beginning is interestingly different to that of the traditional of epic, which usually invokes the muse, or the divine, for inspiration. There are two reasons for Whitman to do this, one being that the importance of the self in which he puts as the birthplace for poetry. To him it is something that comes from the soul freely, it is not a divine intervention for inspiration as the muse or the Holy Spirit as was Dante's inspiration. The other reason is Whitman's own belief that this poem was to be a truly American epic. It is a belief that celebrates the self, or the individual, as the American dream does in its assumption that anyone can achieve anything in this "Land of Opportunity". This idea is reflected in the first two lines where the speaker begins with the line "One's-Self I sing", there is not a direct reference to a singular speaker although it is written
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far,
Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine,
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