Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman have both written literary works where they explore the idea of self-discovery. Ralph Waldo Emerson has written an essay named Self-Reliance and Walt Whitman has written a poem named Song of Myself. The keywords for this essay are self, me and I and these words are well represented in the literary works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, however, the question is what Emerson and Whitman are trying to say with their work and how are their works are interpreted. This analytical essay will focus on how Self is described in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance and Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself.
Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself is a poem where he celebrates the self. One can argue that his poem is quite arrogant especially if they only would focus on the title or the first verse “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (Whitman, 1892). Despite this, Whitman had a lot of interesting
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Emerson wrote, “Society everywhere is in a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater”. In other words, Emerson wanted to open people minds and let them be original people and not to be caught in the obligations of society. Another similarity between the work of Emerson and Whitman is that all people share the same personal thought to believe in, Emerson writes “to believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius” (Emerson, 1967), and Whitman have a similar thought in his poem, “these are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me” (Whitman,