" Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that
peculiarly American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism,
but he came at the end of this movement instead of at the
beginning of it. In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an
era figure. His affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant;
and a volume of Scott's poems which he owned at the age of
sixteen became his "inexhaustible mine and treasury for more than
sixty years." Finally, and quite as uncompromisingly as Emerson,
Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an individualist. He represents the
assertive, Jacksonian period of our national existence. In a
thousand similes he makes a declaration of independence for the
separate person, the "single man" of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa
address. "I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out." Sometimes
this is mere swagger. Sometimes it is superb.
So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's
life. It must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman's
own prose and poetry relate the essentials of his biography.
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