Research Specifications

Although Walt Whitman (1990) is widely believed to intend to create a new American Bible, he, by proclaiming himself as the symbolic representative of common people, a poet-prophet, and matrix of a divine presence, was knowingly or unknowingly the American Bible himself. He endeavoured to be the leader of mankind towards a perfect form of life, truth, and eternity. As opposed to the traditional mystics who usually expressed themselves through abstract terms and who generally quested for the purgation of the self via the denial and mortification of the body and rejection of the physical world, Whitman exalted body pleasure and used concrete terms to illustrate his mystical ideas. In his Song of Myself, Whitman stated that everything and every individual is perfect per se and as “the unseen is proved by the seen,” Whitman (1990, p.45) felt no need to hide anything. He considered love as “a kelson of the creation,” (p.87) binding all together and creating unity in diversity. He placed “the body, the soul, God and the Self on an equal pedestal” (Sharma, 2016, p.69). While he was not a materialist thinker, he frequently sought the spiritual through the material and that helped him create a democratic mysticism available to everybody everywhere. In fact, his mysticism did not negate the material world. On the contrary, he invited everybody including the mystic to be an active member in a democratic society. He tried to awaken one's self and soul through a fusion of sensory and affective experience to see the divinity latent and inherent in the ordinary and in the commonplace. His mysticism did not make a secluded man out of one but an awakened self out of him. In this study, Whitman’s life and thought is shown to be a new version of the American Bible encouraging mankind to appreciate an internal divinity and transcended self within their existence.