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American Transcendentalism

The exuberant tone and wide-ranging vision that Whitman presents in “Song of Myself” reflects the poem’s deep debt to the American strain of Romanticism known as Transcendentalism. Transcendentalism is a uniquely American philosophical tradition, which emerged in the mid-1800s, principally through the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. These and other Transcendentalist thinkers positioned themselves against the rationalism of the eighteenth century. The rationalist tradition emphasized the power of human reason above all other things, and especially above supposedly “nonrational” forms of thought, such as religious faith. By contrast, Transcendentalists felt that the emphasis on human rationality blinds us to the way divinity pervades the entire world, and particularly the natural world. Whitman powerfully reflects the Transcendentalist worldview in “Song of Myself,” whose expansive vision of the world—and even the cosmos—frequently insists on the divinity of all creation. To be sure, Whitman’s is a nondenominational account of creation. Unlike most Americans of his day, he was not a member of any Christian church. Even so, a sense of spirituality pervades his poem and stands behind his speaker’s apparently irrational insistence on his connection to all things in the universe, both great and small.

British Romantic Poetry

Though firmly rooted in the mid-nineteenth-century American context, Whitman’s poetry also reflects the influence of British Romantic poetry from roughly the same period. Key poets from this period included William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Samuel Coleridge, John Keats, and Lord Byron. Two broad trends characterized the Romantic era. First, Romantic writers generally privileged intuition over rationality. Second, they emphasized the expression of emotion over the communication of didactic messages. Shelley encapsulated both these trends in his essay, “A Defence of Poetry” (1840), which pits philosophical reason against the poetic imagination. Whereas reason emphasizes differences, imagination underscores “the similitudes of things.” As such, the poetic imagination is an intuitional form of expression that reveals the underlying unity and beauty of the world, which in turn enables the development of civilization. “Song of Myself” reflects a similar sense of the universe’s underlying unity. More specifically, though, Whitman’s poem emphasizes the self’s spiritual and cosmic oneness with the universe. This notion of the self’s radical expansiveness echoes a central theme in Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic, The Prelude (1850), which documented the growth of the poet’s mind.

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