The Profoundly Essential Veracity Analysis

The Profoundly Essential Veracity
Romanticism and Transcendentalism were two very similar philosophies that stemmed from an indignant contempt of the Enlightenment in Europe. They encompassed groups of people that felt there was something more to the world then just what one could see with the eye. There was feeling and passion! They focused on the “questions of these recurring” (Whitman “Oh Me! Oh Life!” 1). These “recurring questions” concerned the meaning of the universe, nature, and most importantly, truth. The philosophy of truth has been one contemplated by writers over the centuries, specifically by Romantic poets. Questions of what truth is, where it is found, and how to share it have been reviewed over the generations in times of
The philosophy of truth is a complicated and twisted subject that has no one answer. For the writers Walt Whitman, to Emily Dickinson, and back to Emerson, truth is a concept of immense proportions. It is around this essence that one shapes a life. Truth is a necessity to shape the soul. Like life itself, truth is found in one’s own experience. Whitman wrote about listening to an astronomer who “lectured with much applause” (“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” 4). Whitman lived in a time where robotic intellectualism was praised, and yet people could not see the beauty of what they were dissecting. Walt Whitman then wrote, “How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, / Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself” (5-6). Whitman explains how he grows tired and sick of this lecture to the point of “rising and gliding out”. By the end of the poem, he finds the stars the intellects were talking about and experiences them for himself (6-8). He describes this moment as perfect (8). So, truth is found outside of intellectual knowledge, instead finding home in actual encounters. Emerson backs up Whitman in this conjecture saying, “Whoso would be a man must be a
Emerson wrote in one of his pieces named, “Nature,” “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit” (6). Emerson believed that nature reflected the soul, which is a product of the truth one perceives. The key to Emerson’s claim is in his conclusion that nature reflects not just truth but also one’s own truth. Emerson attends to this