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Once when I was taking ballet lessons as a teenager, my teacher was trying to show us how to do fouetté rond de jambe en tournant.  A challenging movement involving repeated turning in place.  Everyone in the class had a lot of difficulty, mostly falling backwards after turning ¾ of the way around.  My teacher complained vigorously that none of us were using the mirror correctly to spot our turns.  In order to complete the final portion of the turn it is necessary to whip your head around and focus on the reflection of your forehead in the mirror for several seconds.  The problem was that none of us were comfortable staring at our own reflections in the mirror.  My ballet teacher asked each of us to say something positive about our reflections.  No one was capable of providing more than the most generic comments, such as I have nice eyes.  As a result, my ballet teacher assigned us the homework of listing three things we liked about our faces, as seen in our reflections, to be read aloud the following week.  This was a surprisingly difficult exercise; I still remember the discomfort I experienced while staring into the mirror.  Examining oneself for blemishes and flaws is very different from searching for beauty and grace.  Whitman is claiming to have found beauty and truth in all of us.  He is celebrating not only himself, but the entire human race.  In his writing, he is holding up a mirror to ourselves and asking us to look long and hard.  The discomfort many readers experience is reason to push back at Whitman.  He is asking us to be less conformative, filtered, and guarded; he wants to remove our shame.