Walt Whitman was a follower of the two Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henry David Thoreau. He believed in Emerson and Thoreau’s Transcendentalist beliefs.
Whitman believed that individualism stems from listening to one’s inner voice and that one’s life is guided by one’s intuition. Whitman lent himself to this concept of independence. He once said, “Everything on earth has the divine spark within and thus is all part of a whole.” This philosophy of individualism led to an optimistic emphasis on society. Because