Emerson v. Whitman What Characteristics

Emerson v. Whitman

What characteristics of Transcendental thought can be seen in Walt Whitman's poetry?

One's Self I sing, a simple separate person," is the first line of Walt Whitman's poem celebrating, or so it seems, the type of individualism advocated in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalist essay "Self-Reliance." As a poet, Whitman embodied and exhibited the ideals of "Self-Reliance," in that he disdained conventional traditions, metrical constructions, and attempted to be true to his own voice and vision. But Whitman's ideal was not a selfish ideal that denied the responsibility of the citizen to the larger collective whole of America, and Whitman was more willing than Emerson to embrace the complete picture provided by nature of the human spirit, the negative as well as the positive.

Even the complex construction of the first, apparently self-reliant phrase of the poem, demonstrates Whitman's different brand of Transcendentalism. Whitman does not say that he loves himself as a poet. Instead, he speaks of "one's self" in the abstract, a self that embodies and represents all human beings, or at least all Americans. The second line of the poem reads: "Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse." Whitman, like Emerson, celebrates the unique possibilities provided by America to create a new culture and spirit. This is along the lines of the Transcendentalist belief that the spirits of the present spoke more to the needs of America than the spirits of the past. However, Whitman's philosophy espoused a kind of collective individualism, not just the universal individualism of the poet of Emerson's writings. Whitman's poet embodied the whole: "The Female equally with the Male I sing." The ideal, for Whitman, was the "Modern Man" who was many ordinary American men, not just the best nonconformist, the Socrates or the Galileo.

Whitman's most Transcendentalist work is "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" in which the speaker describes himself as sickened by a technical lecture in astronomy. The poet hates sitting in the company of others, and a true Transcendentalist, he heads out alone into nature. He says he prefers to be in the "mystical moist night-air" and stare in perfect silence at the stars. The bonding with nature in an individualistic, solitary and mystical fashion is very Emersonian. But Whitman's disdain of intellectualism, even contemporary intellectualism also quite democratic, and unique to the poet's own brand of philosophy.

Like Emerson, Whitman found beauty symbols of American future progress, even in industrial America and standardized and homogenized modern progress like the "Locomotive in Winter": "For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee," cries Whitman, celebrating the terrible, beautiful, awesome power of the moving train cars. Whitman finds inspiration in the man-made device, as well as terror. He optimistic, like Emerson, in this poem about the possibility of progress to create something exciting, but Whitman is more tolerant of ambivalence. Emerson says he is willing to contradict himself, but Whitman actually does in spirit, loving the terror of the locomotive, even while he is wary of it, and what it represents.