Regarding duality, Whitman falls between Melville and Emerson. As his lines from” Song of Myself” illustrate “Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,/Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life,” (31) he acknowledged the binary nature of the universe while still maintaining it as a unified whole. His merging of the two ideas is seen again in these lines, in which he is telling of all the opposing forces which compose him as an individual:
“I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,” (44)
Thus he supports the analogy I favor, that of the world as a yin-yang; a construction complete of itself, yet still composed of internally conflicted elements.