I think that Whitman was something of a mystic in that he saw all of us as part of the whole; but it was the democratic whole. He saw himself as the poet that Emerson called for; Emerson saw him as the poet who answered his challenge.
This yields two themes: the unity of all being (and, if you read his endless lists of "things," none of which are subjugated to another but all treated as equal you understand where this is coming from. The other is American as the fulfillment of the democratic idea. This is similar to his mystical view of the unity of all things, but is more political, more based in the reality of what he saw and lived with.
Indians, blacks, Irish, gays, straighs, men, prostitutes, laborers, women, old, young ... these were all part of the theoretical unity of being, expressed in the structure of America.
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