What kind of life does the poet in "Song of Myself" (Leaves of Grass) wish man to have? Does this work illustrate that Walt Whitman is an American...

Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" is a long sprawling poem in free verse that uses a narrative persona both specific in details such as age and place and mythic in its ability to incorporate the vastness that is the New World. In the poem, Whitman strives to create a genuinely American persona and poetics and identifies the former with the latter. The new poetry for him is associated with a new, unexplored land, vast, expansive...

Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" is a long sprawling poem in free verse that uses a narrative persona both specific in details such as age and place and mythic in its ability to incorporate the vastness that is the New World. In the poem, Whitman strives to create a genuinely American persona and poetics and identifies the former with the latter. The new poetry for him is associated with a new, unexplored land, vast, expansive and free, and a new type of person, as untrammeled by the shibboleths of European culture as the land is free from the burden of European history. 

The new American self of the poem is one that forges life and thought anew in a new world:

Creeds and schools in abeyance...

I permit to speak at every hazard,

Nature without check with original energy.

The new self is defined by freedom from old constraints of ideology, religion, social, and sexual conventions, free to speak and love as it wills. It is purely natural and associated with the natural wilderness of the New World rather than the urbanism of the Old World. It is uncorrupted and open to experience. Religiously, the poem in pantheistic, seeing the divine in all things. 

Thus the poem is Whitman's effort to create himself as an American bard writing a uniquely American poetry, freed from the poetic conventions of the Old World.