Great Are The Myths - Analysis

A litany that tries to make everything belong

Whitman’s central move is simple and audacious: by repeating Great is he treats the world’s fiercest contrasts as equally worthy of reverence, as if the poem could train the reader out of narrow judgment. He begins with inherited stories—the myths, Adam and Eve, risen and fallen nations—and immediately places himself inside them: I too delight, I too look back. That doubled I too matters. The speaker isn’t debunking tradition; he is absorbing it, insisting that modern belief can be capacious enough to hold ancient myth, political history, and personal appetite at once.

The tone is public and electric—part hymn, part political address—yet it keeps slipping into intimacy. When he tells Helmsmen of nations to choose your craft, the voice sounds like a comrade at the rail, promising where you sail, I sail. Greatness, here, isn’t distance or superiority; it’s fellowship, the willingness to weather it out together, even to sink together.

Equality built out of opposites: Youth/Old Age, Day/Night, Wealth/Poverty

The poem argues for equality not by flattening difference, but by pairing it. Whitman’s sequences are almost like courtroom exhibits for a claim: Great is Youth—equally great is Old Age; great are the Day and Night; Great is Wealth—great is Poverty. He gives Youth a sensual, crowded brightness—large, lusty, loving—then refuses to let it keep the stage. Old age is promised equal grace, force, fascination, not as consolation but as a real rival to youth’s glamour. Likewise Day arrives as immense sun, action, ambition, then Night presses close with millions of suns and restoring darkness. Even the “lesser” term turns out to contain a hidden abundance.

This is where Whitman’s optimism has bite: he doesn’t say poverty is pleasant; he asks us to imagine a kind of richness that humiliates ordinary measures—Poverty richer than wealth. Wealth gets its sensual props—fine clothes, hospitality—but then he pivots to the Soul’s wealth: candor, knowledge, pride, enfolding love. Greatness becomes an inner capacity rather than a social ranking.

Expression versus Silence: the poem’s most uncomfortable greatness

The most convincing test of his idea comes when he praises not only speech but what cancels speech: forget not that Silence is also expressive. He makes silence carry extreme emotional temperatures—anguish without words, contempt without words. That detail prevents the poem from becoming mere cheerleading. If silence can express the hottest anguish, then “greatness” must include what cannot be marketed, performed, or even articulated. In other words, Whitman’s equality isn’t just political; it is psychological: the inner life, including the shut-down or unsayable parts, must be admitted into the human record.

The turn toward Earth and Truth: from catalog to pursuit

Section 2 shifts the poem from declaring to chasing. The speaker stops naming pairs and instead looks at deep time: the Earth moving forward from covering waters and gases to the present, and still not stopt. The greatness he praises now is process—ongoing increase—so the reader is pushed to think of humanity as unfinished.

Out of that moving Earth he extracts a second foundation: Truth. Importantly, he refuses to treat truth as a slogan. The truth in man is no dictum; it is vital as eyesight. He piles up conditional clauses—If there be any Soul, if there be man or woman—as though he is stripping the world to bare existence and finding truth embedded there. The tone becomes urgent and bodily: I am determin’d to press my way; I scale mountains, dive in the sea. Truth is not a conclusion; it is a terrain you pursue.

Language, English destiny, and the poem’s strained universalism

Section 3 raises the stakes by calling language the mightiest of the sciences, greater than buildings, ships, religions—a startling hierarchy in a poem that has been praising almost everything. Language becomes the vessel that can hold the world’s fulness, color, form, diversity. But here the poem exposes a tension it never fully resolves: Whitman’s expansive equality abruptly narrows into a triumphal claim for the English speech and the English brood, a destiny to rule the earth.

He tries to soften “rule” by redefining it: the new rule will rule as the Soul rules, through love, justice, equality. Yet the language of mastery remains. The poem’s universal embrace—liberty and equality for all—sits uneasily beside a vision of one “brood” governing the rest. This is one of the poem’s crucial contradictions: Whitman wants a spiritual democracy large enough for everyone, but he also speaks in the accent of empire.

Justice in the Soul: the poem’s sternest music

In Section 4 the voice becomes almost prophetic. Great is Justice! is no longer a celebration of variety; it is a claim of inevitability. Justice is not made by legislators and laws; it is in the Soul, as unchangeable as gravity. The poem’s earlier openness—its willingness to call both wealth and poverty “great”—tightens into a moral certainty: an exact tribunal before which majorities don’t matter.

Whitman intensifies this by imagining the perfect judge who fears nothing and could stand front to front before God. That image raises the poem’s temperature: we move from inclusive comradeship (where you sail, I sail) to an awe-filled courtroom where life and death must stand back. Greatness here is not sympathy; it is impartiality.

Life and Death: the final reversal of “purport”

The last section compresses the poem’s logic into a final paradox: Great is Life, but Great is Death too. Whitman gives Death the same binding power he gave Life: each holds all parts together. Then he goes further, reversing common sense: Has Life much purport? and answers, Death has the greatest purport. After all the catalogs of greatness, he ends by granting ultimate meaning not to the busy brightness of Day, youth, wealth, and expression, but to the dark cohesion that makes all parts finally cohere.

A hard question the poem leaves behind

If Silence can carry wordless anguish, and if justice answers to an exact tribunal beyond majorities, what happens to the speaker’s earlier pledge of solidarity—I weather it out with you? The poem seems to want both: limitless fellowship and a passionless court that makes everyone stand back. It is as if Whitman can’t decide whether greatness means belonging together, or being judged alone.