Conversation between Leaves of Grass and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Abstract

Seemingly there are no convergences between Walt Whitman and Friedrich Nietzsche because the former focuses on the common people or the masses while the latter is interested in a few elite. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, however, shares a lot of similarities with Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is interesting to notice that there are convergences between an American poet and a German philosopher of the 19th century. But it is not surprising that they yield some resemblance because they have been influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is very helpful to use Michel Foucault’s notion of history to connect Whitman and Nietzsche. According to Foucault, history is made of emerging events rather than inheritance of the past. Both Whitman and Nietzsche focus on the present rather than the past, arguing that we should obey the laws we have formulated for ourselves. They perceptively know that each individual has his own thought, and that each age should reformulate its own truth. We can notice parallels in their thought of and expression on self-reliance and their defiance of conventions and tradition. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra are also compared in terms of the body, divinity, the good and evil, death, woman, friendship, and the state to find out convergences and divergences between the two literary works.