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Walt Whitman consciously set out to forge a personal path for himself as a poet. Inspired by contemporaries like Emerson who expressed a need for a new, uniquely American style of poetry, Whitman eschewed conventions he saw as outdated or undemocratic. Setting aside traditional rhyme, meter, and even brevity, Whitman favored a style that was declarative, direct, and maximalist. For subject matter he focused on the common individual, as democratic representative of all humanity, and the natural world of which humanity exists as an integral part. "Song of Myself" is perhaps the most well-known exemplar of this aesthetic.