Question

Many argue that Walt Whitman is a Transcendentalist.

Answer 1

Walt Whitman was a poet of the Romanticism movement and mostly all of his literary works follows the transitions of between the transcendentalist and the philosophical realism.

Transcendendalists believed that society and social institutions corrupted the purity of individuals. The guiding principle of this philosophical movement is the belief that people are at their best when they are self-reliant and independent, but a little of idealism was corrupted inside the transcendentalism adding that the body was coupled with a sense of metaphysics or higher than other things.

From the notes on Leaves of Grass, Whitman should be considered a transcendentalist because in this collection the poems involves the themes of the body and soul. It stands both for the individual self and all of the humanity, declaring that the body is one and the same as the soul. His writings followed the transcendentalism with idealistic thoughts, stating that the peacefulness of the body is better accomplished with the sense of self-reliance and independence.