A Few Musts di un bardo americano. Walt Whitman e i confini transatlantici della poetica romantica

Abstract

This essay explores Walt Whitman’s poetics of the soul, between “sympathy” and “egotism”, with a focus on the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) in the larger context of “Transatlantic Romanticism”. As Emerson’s thought may be viewed as the Western fulfillment of a whole idealist tradition out of Germany and England, so Whitman’s work may be said to have not only fulfilled the scriptures of Emerson the prophet and “master”, but also aspired to bring to completion ‒ expansively, across the waters ‒ a whole Romantic tradition of verse which had flowered half a century earlier in the Old World.