The father of American Transcendentalism,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the leading architect of American poetry, Walt
Whitman, had a complicated relationship. Emerson, a fountainhead of American
individuality, praised the as yet unknown poet Whitman for his first edition of
Leaves of Grass: “I greet you at the
beginning of a great career.” Whitman, having been much inspired by Emerson and
his philosophy of Transcendentalism, was honored by this high praise. Nevertheless,
he unscrupulously realized a tremendous promotional plan and included an
unauthorized publication of Emerson’s letter in a later edition of Leaves of Grass. For this brazen act Whitman
received much criticism. Emerson had generously, albeit privately, acknowledged
this budding poet as the poetic voice for Transcendentalism: “I give you
joy of your free and brave thought.” Whitman shamelessly exploited this unsolicited
praise without any recognition of Emerson’s bearing on his poetry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882) was an American scholar who joined other New England intellectuals
to form the Transcendental Club. Transcendentalism emerged from Boston Unitarianism
and the German Idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The core belief was that
humans were at their best in nature and uncorrupted by institutions and
society. Adherents believed in the inherent goodness of people and nature,
self-reliance, and non-conformity. Emerson’s first book, Nature, which he published anonymously at his own expense, is the
quintessential treatise on Transcendental thought:
In the woods, we
return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, —
no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.
Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted
into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent
eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being
circulate through me; I am part or particle of God (Emerson 511).
Nature established Emerson as an intellectual force to
be reckoned with, however, “because he so valued individual self-culture,
Emerson was skeptical of the social reforms” that swept the country in the mid
19th Century (Baym et al. 507). Despite his skepticism, he did support
the emancipation of women and slaves and praised a homosexual poet.
Walt Whitman illustrated
Emerson’s veneration of nature and self in his heroic poem “Song of Myself.” He
opens with “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” and continues with:
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at
what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I
permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with
original energy (Whitman 1025).
Whitman’s “transparent
eyeball” is focused on “leaves of grass,” a metaphor for all the unique individuals,
more alike than different, creating the national character of America. In what
may be considered an apologetic letter to Emerson, Whitman wrote in 1856:
Of course, we shall have a
national character, an identity. As it ought to be, and as soon as it ought to
be, it will be. That, with much else, takes care of itself, is a result, and
the cause of greater results. With Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Oregon—with the
states around the Mexican sea—with cheerfully welcomed immigrants from Europe,
Asia, Africa—with Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island—with all
varied interests, facts, beliefs, parties, genesis—there is being fused a
determined character, fit for the broadest use for the freewomen and freemen of
The States, accomplished and to be accomplished, without any exception
whatever—each indeed free, each idiomatic, as becomes live states and men, but
each adhering to one enclosing general form of politics, manners, talk,
personal style, as the plenteous varieties of the race adhere to one physical
form. Such character is the brain and spine to all, including literature,
including poems. Such character, strong, limber, just, open-mouthed,
American-blooded, full of pride, full of ease, of passionate friendliness, is
to stand compact upon that vast basis of the supremacy of Individuality—that
new moral American continent without which, I see, the physical continent
remained incomplete, may-be a carcass, a bloat—that newer America, answering
face to face with The States, with ever-satisfying and ever-unsurveyable seas
and shores (Whitman 1094-1095).
Whitman went on to
acknowledge that Emerson “led The States” to those shores and “have led Me
there. I say that none has ever done, or ever can do, a greater deed for The
States, than your deed” (1095).
In Walt Whitman’s America, author David Reynolds referred to Emerson’s
letter to Whitman as the “Gettysburg Address of American literary commentary.”
Reynolds explains how Whitman should have realized his debt to Emerson:
If Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
remade America, as Garry Wills says, Emerson's letter came close to making
Whitman. It was constantly reprinted, quoted, and cited by Whitman's defenders,
often with Whitman's encouragement. Just as the Gettysburg Address soared above
details of battles or political squabbles and made an eloquent generalization
about the goals of the nation, so Emerson's letter made a holistic,
transcendental statement about Whitman's poetry. (qtd. in
http://www. classroomelectric.org/volume1/belasco/whitman-emerson.htm)
Critics scolded Whitman for
not asking Emerson’s permission to publish his private letter of praise, which
would have been a proper and traditional gesture. Yet, Whitman’s impropriety
was a demonstration of his utter incorporation of non-conformity, one of the
tenants of Emersonian philosophy. It is this philosophy that established the
American voice as independent of Mother England. It is Whitman’s “Song of
Myself” that welcomed all these individual identities to unite in
non-conformity:
And it means, Sprouting alike in
broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the
same (Whitman 1028).
In section 15 of “Song of Myself” Whitman lists over 50 diverse
Americans who “one and all I weave the song of myself.” From the “half-breed”
who “straps on his light boots to compete in the race” and “groups of
newly-come immigrants” to the floor-men, tinners, masons, flatboatmen,
patriarchs, prostitutes, and “President holding a cabinet council,” all are
Americans with a unique resonance that rings true to the song that is these
United States (1033-1035).
Works Cited
Baym, Nina, gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of
American Literature. 8th ed.
New
York: Norton, 2012. Print.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Nature.” The Norton Anthology of American
Literature. Ed. Nina Baym.
8th ed.
New York: Norton. 2013. 508-536. Print.
Whitman, Walt. “Letter to
Ralph Waldo Emerson.” The
Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Ed. Nina Baym. 8th ed.
New York: Norton. 2013. 1088-1095. Print.
---. “Song of Myself.” The Norton Anthology of American
Literature. Ed. Nina Baym.
8th ed.
New York: Norton. 2013. 1024-1067. Print.
