Walt Whitman’s language is loose yet precise, varied but common, and it illustrates a perfect balance between the real and the artistic. The structure flows coalesces and begins to flow again while all the while remains a simple list-like form.

However ,within this list, he pulls and plays with emotions and moves from excitement into doubt and then to resolution to rescind all doubts. Doubt begins as the child moves from the pleasant natural world into the human world he is subjected to. The ills of the drunkard, the boys and his father manipulate the child and pushes him beyond the comfortable bounds of childhood and nature and forces him to deal with the negative aspects of human existence: the child moves from the tactile understanding of reality into the doubt of the mind. The permanency of emotion and the place of the individual within the group.

Finally, the real world intrudes again and the child leaves the mental world and resolves to enter the real world experiences the world as it is without being subjected to the existential doubts that flooded his mind as the world intruded on his excitement.

The flaws portrayed by Aylmer in “The Birthmark” and Digby in “The Man of Adamant” are fairly straightforward, but Hooper, in “The Minister’s Black Veil”, portrays one central theme with an infinite number of explanations which, by comparison, makes Aylmer and Digby seem rather simplistic and one dimensional in their behavior. Hooper’s black veil symbolizes the separation of the internal from the external, but the cause or reasoning behind the veil is nearly impossible to determine because it lends itself to so many different interpretations— the veil could just as easily be interpreted to allude to a secret sin on the part of Hooper, a symbol of the private lives people attempt to live, or a symbol of the separation an individual feels from society, but the most basic explanation is that Hooper’s veil represents the barrier that individuals creates to separate the internal and external world. Regardless of the reasoning for the separation, Hooper, like Aylmer and Digby, places himself outside the control of society, and the veil symbolizes his attempt to transcend the reach of mere mortals just as Aylmer’s science allowed him to transcend nature and Digby’s cave allowed him to transcend religion. These attempts at separation are not the works of learned men, but the work of the mean egotism which has griped these men allowing them to believe in their own innate superiority.

The egotism that Hooper, Aylmer and Digby display is excessive, but through their egotism, they vividly display the flaws that lead them to their excessive behavior and show the reader the fetters to achieving perfection. Digby attempts to gain perfection by secluding himself from the world with only his religion as company, but ends up dead unable to even commune with his god because this separation was one of mind, body and spirit. Similarly, Aylmer’s attempts to separate himself from nature resulted in the destruction of the perfection he was trying to achieve. Hooper, however, in trying to separate the internal and external world demonstrates the inability of such a separated individual to fully function in society, but while Hooper’s separation of the internal and external self met with mostly negative results, Hopper, unlike Digby and Aylmer, was able to achieve some good through his separation from society: in separating himself physically and emotionally from his peers, he caused them to examine their own perceptions of the internal self, but he also allowed them to ignore what they found and focus on the perception of his internal and external persona. Thus, to some extent, he was able to achieve a sort of perfection, in that no one was able to perceive his true inner self.

The struggle for a form of perfection is part of the intrinsic nature of these three protagonists, but for each they are unable to achieve the perfection they seek because of their own flawed nature. The flaws in their personal nature twists their sense of perfection, but their innate human nature makes it impossible for them to even achieve this flawed perfection, so although they believe they are entitled, through intellect or God, to move beyond the average person, they are unable to because the egotism that drives them is also their greatest flaw.

In “This Compost” Whitman examines the process of death and rebirth, and his interpretations of the dead changes as he realizes that death is just the fuel for new life. Whitman’s perspective of death in “This Compost” is that of the distant observer who sees death as a part of life. By approaching only the mechanics of death, Whitman is able to separate the emotional from the physical, and see that the dead are just the fuel of the Earth that “grows such sweet things out of such corruptions” and “gives such divine materials to men” (42, 46). This perspective allows Whitman to realize that death is not something to be feared, but should be embraced because without the processes of death, nothing can live.

Whitman did not just suddenly realize the beneficial aspects of death. He begins “This Compost” marveled and repulsed that the Earth is “work’d over and over with sour dead” (9). He contrasts the summer growth that is “innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead” with the buried remains of “[t]hose drunkards and gluttons of so many generations” (29, 11). Realizing that the world above is not polluted by the dead below the ground demonstrates that death is not a corrupter but fuel. This revelation is startling, and he resolves himself to be both terrified by and respectful of the Earth that is bound to such a contradictory process.

The contradictions begun in “This Compost” are continued in “The Cradle Endlessly Rocking” when Whitman recounts his realization that death, beyond being a fuel for life, can also be the source of a poet’s muse, which he demonstrates in his “reminiscence” of the death of and longing for a she-bird he had oft heard singing. Superficially the poem shows a boy, widely regarded to be Walt Whitman himself, witnessing the life and death of a she-bird and the effect it has on her mate, a he-bird. The boy translates the he-birds mourning song into words, and the boy believes that the death of the she-bird has, “My own songs, awaked from that hour” and the boy has given him “already a thousand singers—a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours, / A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, / Never to die.” (188; 151-3).

However, the poem is more than just the awakening of Whitman’s muse, it is also a timeless expression of the conflicting emotions that result from death. The conflicting emotional response to death in this poem encompass pain, joy, loss and gratitude, and demonstrates the perspective of one who is directly affected by death, and it mirrors Whitman’s conflicting view of the physical nature of death in “This Compost.” While the representation of this poem as a poet’s realization of his potential and the multifaceted nature of death seems to be the most artistic and profound interpretation, other interpretations have also been offered.

One can also link Whitman’s view of death as a word “stronger and more delicious than any” with the historical onslaught of the American Civil War. Betsy Erkkila offers that this poem was “written at a time of national crisis” and that one should “recognize the historical roots of this elegy of dissolution in the state of the nation on the eve of the Civil War.” While one cannot ignore the setting and period that a poem was written, to focus too much on such aspects of poetry detract from the timeless nature and the emotional resonance of the ideas presented within. Whitman may have been writing about the death of the “united” part of the United States of America, but it does not change that the poem can be interpreted to encompass and applied to death in general as a “transient permutation of elegiac narrative” (Mark Bauerlein).

The Bright Romantic interpretation of death contrasts with the interpretation of death by Dark Romantics. For the Bright romantics, death is just another change in life that they must accept and move beyond, but for the Dark Romantics it is just another limit that corrals them and leaves them powerless. Walt Whitman resolved within himself that death is the cause of grief and the cause of joy, creates life as well as destroys it, and it can bring either happiness or sorrow. This dual nature of death invigorated him and gave him a reason to live and a reason to create.

Arguably the most important “power” that these writers attributed to the individual was the individual’s right to power over their own beings. The ability to self-determine one’s destiny was not only necessary to the underpinnings of enlightenment, but it was also necessary to advance society as a whole. By allowing individuals to have power over their individual being, they became their own masters: no longer subjected by the whims of a larger society. As an illustration of these principles, once released from the tenets of religion, Benjamin Franklin “conceiv’d the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection” (364). By believing in the power of the self and the equality of men he accomplished this without requiring a higher moral authority , Franklin defined his own moral perfection and strove to achieve it. The power the individual has over the self is absolute, but as Poe warns, this can be used for ill: in Poe’s tale of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his protagonist envisions the world around him through the filter of his own demented mind. The conflicts in the character’s internal self become so profuse that he projects them externally and creates an old man whose eye haunts him, and he is eventually undone when he fails to recognize the beatings of his own heart. This absolute power is both the greatest curse and privilege of the Enlightenment and Romantic views of the self, so rather than leaving this power unchecked, they emphasized the power of Nature as both the antithesis to the self and the guide of the self.

Even though the release from mortal authority and the servitude of religion was central to the Enlightenment, they did not banish the Deities. Instead they either personified deities as part of the natural world which allowed the individual the opportunity to be “part or particle of God” (Emerson, 657) or defined the deities as separate from the world and as a creator but not a participatory member of the universe. Franklin was one of the original Deisitic writers in American Literature, and believed in the separation of religion from God because of the oppressive and meddlesome nature of churches which mixed their theology “with other Articles which without any tendency to inspire, promote or confirm Morality, serv’d principally to divide us & make us unfriendly to one another” (Franklin, 363). As Romantic writing developed it moved the Enlightened Deity from the role of creator into the natural world by blending the deity into Nature and science. This natural view of God continued the deistic way of thinking, and removed much of the remaining power of the organized churches allowing people to find and define their own personal church, and while some created cathedrals out of mountains and trees, others made theirs out of numbers, facts and figures creating the first conflicts between the mystical nature and the exacting sciences.

While the individual had the power to determine their own personal beliefs, some found that they were still oppressed by things they could not control: science became increasingly important, and to some, this was as oppressive as the monarchs and gods of the past. Their objection was that in becoming the absolute authority, science created a monochromatic image of the world which stifled the individual’s ability to perceive the world around him for what he believed it was; however, others quickly realized that science allowed them to open their eyes and see the world both as it was and how it could be. Poe and Thoreau, in a clash between bright and dark romanticism, viewed science differently with the more middle-of-the-road approach being attributed to to the bright romantics. In Poe’s “Sonnet “” to Science” he attacks the mundane aspects of science and refers to it as a “Vulture! whose wings are dull realities” (1223), but Thoreau, in his journals, embraces science, but believes that one can only truly appreciate something when one “forget[s] all [their] learning and get[s] rid of what is called knowledge”. Poe believes that the science accosts his creativity and stifles his ability to be an individual and exercise his hard-won individualism, but Thoreau is capable of independently appreciating nature even if his opinions are invalidated by science because he believes that his power over his own perceptions is absolute, so balancing the science with the mystery of Nature and the joy of poetic expression is not difficult him or other “bright” romantics. These two different views of science are brought about by the way the writers treat science: Poe personified science and held it blamable rather than as a tool, but Thoreau treats science as a tool and because of this, he is able to cast it aside when it is unnecessary while Poe’s creations and imaginings are constantly surrounded, attacked and restrained by a personified science which replaces the monarchs and gods. For writers of similar beliefs to Poe, this restriction by science was contrary to the ideals of Romanticism, and created a stumbling block that hemmed in the powers of the individual.

The only restrictions on the individual, other than the perception of a restrictive science and or those self-imposed, were the restrictions of society itself. These societal restrictions are not the same as the restrictions of a Monarch, but are the attempts of society to control the individual and harness their powers for the good of society itself. To the Romantics, this acceptance of societal pressures was a sort of voluntary defeat which according to some, like Thoreau, was necessary because not all were capable of fully controlling their own lives (820). Thoreau believed that most people spent their lives “sleeping” only using their minds for menial pursuits and living lives “of quiet desperation” (813). However, while Thoreau allowed for control of these sleepers, he believed that should a man wish to remove themselves from the societal order, they should be allowed to: regardless of its effects on the society itself. Thus, the individual is simultaneously an integral component of society, but also transcends such mean concerns when it is necessary for the individual to exercise their powers of reason, imagination, logic and creation.

The writers of the the Enlightenment and Romantic period defined the individual as the reasoning and logical self which interacts with the larger external world, and the powers they attributed to their creation were immense, but they tempered the powers of the individual with the power and mystery of nature. This individualistic view of the self replaced the mean collectivism of European society and formed the foundation of modern perceptions of the individual.