E pluribus unum—out of many, one. This is the motto of the United States of America, a nation that prides itself with democratic characteristics such as individual rights, community through patriotism, freedom, and equality for all. However, these concepts are just ideals as individualism and community contradict each other as well as freedom and equality, and historically America has had difficulty balancing these ideals. One of Walt Whitman poems preaches the possibility that these concepts can work together. “Song of Myself” is Whitman’s paean to his ideal of American democracy, an idea which balances, or attempts to balance, freedom with equality, individualism with community, a relentlessly inclusive, or as Whitman puts it, “absorptive”…