Whitmania: Round 2, Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism, an idealist philosophical tendency among writers in and around Boston in the mid-19th century. Growing out of Christian Unitarianism in the 1830s under the influence of German and British Romanticism, Transcendentalism affirmed Kant's principle of intuitive knowledge not derived from the senses, while rejecting organized religion for an extremely individualistic celebration of the divinity in each human being. The leading Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson issued what was virtually the movement's manifesto in his essay Nature (1836), which presents natural phenomena as symbols of higher spiritual truths. The nonconformist individualism of the Transcendentalists is expressed in Emerson's essay ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841) and in Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854)—a kind of autobiographical sermon against modern materialism. Others involved in the Transcendental Club in the late 1830s and with its magazine The Dial (1840–4) included Amos Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and William Ellery Channing. The Transcendentalists' manner of interpreting nature in symbolic terms had a profound influence on American literature of this period, notably in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. See also American Renaissance. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, ed Christopher Baldick).

In studying the various works of Whitman, I have noticed that, in keeping with Emerson’s Transcendentalism, he sought to reconcile nature with man. In his poetry he saw the immensity and divinity of nature reflected in humanity. The same awe that Wordsworth and Coleridge had for nature Whitman shared; however within nature there is something transcendent that extends itself to the souls of humans. There is no distinction between nature and people because what makes nature divine is the same as what makes humans divine. For example, in the first part of “Song of Myself” he writes:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

The speaker sees the spear of grass and is drawn into a reverie about how connected he is to everything, including nature and the reader of the poem.

Also, implied through this revelation is the fact that the speaker now begins his life. Whitman writes, “I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin.” This shows the awe and respect that Whitman had for nature. In it comes the realisation that through this connection to nature he is awakened and can officially begin his life. It seems that Whitman brought respect and awe for nature to a new level for the “New World”.

Thoughts?