Walt Whitman as a Transcendentalist poet

         Transcendentalism, which originated with German philosophers, became a powerful movement in New England between 1815 and 1836. Emerson's Nature (1836) was a manifesto of American transcendental thought. It implied that the true reality is the spirit and that it lies beyond the reach or realm of the senses. The area of sensory perceptions must be transcended to reach the spiritual reality. American transcendentalism accepted the findings of contemporary science as materialistic counterparts of spiritual achievement.

            Walt Whitman is considered as one of the most prominent transcendental poets of all time. His famous poems are a call to celebrate humanity and nature. He believes in embracing nature, life and humanity. These beliefs are present in most of his poems. We can also say that because of this, his poems have affected and elevated human values over time. One of the most present themes in Whitman’s poems is nature, which reflects his transcendentalist belief. This idea is exemplified in one of the stanzas in “I Celebrate Myself and Sing Myself”: I loaf and invite my soul, I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. This shows the author’s connection to nature with just a single spear of grass; the author invites us to share this connection with nature, which we seem to have lost in our busy lives.

            Whitman's major concern was to explore, discuss, and celebrate his own self, his individuality and his personality. Second, he wanted to eulogise democracy and the American nation with its achievements and potential. Third, he wanted to give poetical expression to his thoughts on life's great, enduring mysteries — birth, death, rebirth or resurrection, and reincarnation.

            To Whitman, the complete self is both physical and spiritual. The self is man's individual identity, his distinct quality and being, which is different from the selves of other men, although it can identify with them. The self is a portion of the one Divine Soul. Whitman's critics have sometimes confused the concept of self with egotism, but this is not valid. Whitman is constantly talking about "I," but the "I" is universal, a part of the Divine, and therefore not egotistic.

            Whitman is a poet of these elements in man, the body and the soul. He thought that we could comprehend the soul only through the medium of the body. To Whitman, all matter is as divine as the soul; since the body is as sacred and as spiritual as the soul, when he sings of the body or its performances, he is singing a spiritual chant.

            Whitman shares the Romantic poet's relationship with nature. To him, as to Emerson, nature is divine and an emblem of God. The universe is not dead matter, but full of life and meaning. He loves the earth, the flora and fauna of the earth, the moon and stars, the sea, and all other elements of nature. He believes that man is nature's child and that man and nature must never be disjoined.

            Whitman's concept of the ideal poet is, in a way, related to his ideas on time. He conceives of the poet as a time-binder, one who realises that the past, present, and future are "not disjoined, but joined," that they are all stages in a continuous flow and cannot be considered as separate and distinct. These modern ideas of time have given rise to new techniques of literary expression — for example, the stream-of-consciousness viewpoint. Whitman believed that the cosmos, or the universe, does not consist merely of lifeless matter; it has awareness. It is full of life and filled with the spirit of God. The cosmos is God, and God is the cosmos; death and decay are unreal. This cosmic consciousness is, indeed, the most important aspect of Whitman's transcendentalism.