Student Question
What are the similarities and differences between Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self Reliance"?
I actually already did my compare and contrast essay but it was a rough draft and my teacher said that I did not have enough information.
Quick answer:
"Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman and "Self Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson both emphasize the importance of individualism and subjective experience, integral to the transcendentalist movement. They explore self-discovery and emotional insight as pathways to understanding the world, contrasting with the objective truth sought through science and rationalism. While Whitman celebrates the self in a poetic form, Emerson advocates for self-reliance in prose, highlighting their distinct literary approaches.
I would say that it would be appropriate to focus on the time period or literary movement in which both works are immersed. Both works help to enhance the notion of self within literature. The idea of exploring the subjective experience as a way of gaining more insight into the world around us is of vital importance to the movement, and something upon which both Whitman's work and Emerson's writing places emphasis. Both works are part of a movement that praised and valued emotions and the emotional exploration of self as critical to understanding in the world. This is not a literary movement that sought to explore objective truth through science or rationalism, but rather did so through the idea of self and what that entails.
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