Transcendentalism in the Poems of Whitman Looking at the titles of Walt Whitman's vast collection of poems in Leaves of Grass one might assume that the great American poet wrote on many subjects - - expressing his ideas and thoughts on everything from religion to Abraham Lincoln. The opposite is true, Walt Whitman only wrote about a single topic that was so powerful in the poet's mind that it consumed him to the point that whatever he wrote echoed that topic. The beliefs and principles of Transcendentalism were the subjects that drove Whitman to write and were carried forward not only in the words and images of his poems, but also in the revolutionary way in which he chose to write his poems. The basic assumptions and premises of transcendentalism can be seen throughout Whitman's poems and are evident in two short poetic masterpieces: "A Noiseless Patient Spider" and "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer". reliance on intuition, rather than rationalization, became the means to a union between the soul of an individual and the soul of the world or cosmos. Called the Oversoul by Emerson, this collective soul collected a person's soul upon his or her death. To understand the Oversoul, one must first understand oneself and then look to nature as expressions and instructions for living one's life (Boller 1-3). Throughout Whitman's collections of poems, essays, and letters, he sought to find the meaning of life and understand the Oversoul, which the great poet called the "floater." In “A Noiseless Patient,” Whitman presents a simple analogy that compares a solitary spider searching for a hold on its soul as… center of paper… au, The Transcendenalist Constant in American Literature New York: New York UP , 1980.Boller,. Paul. American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860: An Intellectual Inquiry New York: Putnam, 1974. Eckley, Wilton. "A Silent Patient Spider" by Whitman. "The Explicator 22 (1963): 20. Emmanuel, Lenny of Science and Poetry." Walt Whitman Review 17 (1971): 73-81. Lindfors, Berndt. "Whitman's 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer'." Walt Whitman Review 10 (1964): 19-21. Stedman, Edmund Clarence. "A Leading American Critic Considers Whitman." New York: Penguin, 1980. 347-348. Whitman, Walt. "When I heard the learned astronomer." Leaves of grass. New York: Penguin, 1980. 226-227.