Whitman Transcendentalism Quotes

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete, The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.

The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones, The exquisite realization of health; O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, O I say now these are the soul!

He read me Whitman, of whom he was very fond, and also Emerson. I didn't like Whitman, and said so. I always thought him a writer who tried to bully his way to prophecy. Of Emerson at the time I had no opinions to offer. I found him out later to be a sugary humbug. His transcendental bunkum sickened me.

My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach, With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds.

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

By sacralizing both nature and human flesh, Whitman set the poetic template for what some consider a homegrown Tantra, the stream of Vedic spirituality that sees the divine in the mundane and directs sensory experience toward spiritual realization. “He taught people a way of beholding nature which is itself a form of prayer,” said the author and poet Diane Ackerman. She called Leaves of Grass “a sacred American text about the essential goodness and perfectibility of people, the sanctity of the common man, the holiness of the human body viewed naked and up close, the privilege of democracy, the need to forge one’s own destiny, and the duty of all to discover the world anew, by living in a state of rampant amazement at the endless pocket-size miracles one encounters every day.”16 That is as good a description of an American Tantra as can be imagined. Transcendental

More than any other piece, “The State of German Literature” is the call-to-arms of transcendentalism. One can see Emerson’s American scholar and Whitman’s American poet in Carlyle’s praise of the Fichte who said, “There is a Divine Idea pervading the visible universe; which visible universe is indeed but a symbol and sensible manifestation,” and who then insisted that not theologians but literary men are the appointed interpreters of this Divine Idea: a perpetual priesthood, we might say, standing forth, generation after generation, as the dispensers and living types of God’s everlasting wisdom, to show and embody it in their writings and actions, in such particular forms as their own particular times require it in.