Keywords:
• Transcendentalism/
• Myself/
• God/
• Body and soul/
• Pantheism

Abstract:“On Myself,” the theme song of Walt Whitman' s Leaves of Grass, states the poet' s basic poetic conception. In this poem, Whitman seeks an answer to the question:“What is ' myself' ?”which provokes philosophical thinking. In the process of explicating the question, the poet, as a member of the transcendentalist Concord Club, expresses his understanding of such paired cognitive subjects and cognized objects as“body and soul,”“God and self,” etc. This paper discusses the relations of Whitman' s philosophy and that of the 19th century major philosophers such as Kent, Hegel, and Emerson from the perspective of philosophical poetics, and meanwhile demonstrates the poet' s profound transcendental concept of pantheism through discussing the nature of self and God, and the combination of body and soul.