ABSTRACT

The unnamed poem Emerson read, that would later be called “Walt Whitman” and later still “Song of Myself,” begins as a translation into concrete and personal terms of what Emerson has said about how to attain to “self-trust” in several paragraphs of “Self-Reliance.” Emerson must surely have seen, as he read Walt Whitman poem, a remarkable parallel between what he had written and what he was reading. Whitman’s emphatic denial, in writing, that he knew Emerson’s work before he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass has too often been taken at face value. Whitman was going to hear Emerson lecture and reading the essays for some ten years or so before his own book appeared. He reviewed Emerson and quoted from him in articles he wrote for the newspapers he was working for. In “The Poet” Emerson had said that the poet tells “how it was with him,” writing “his autobiography in colossal cipher.”