Malcolm Cowley, from "Hindu Mysticism and Whitman's 'Song of Myself,'" in "Introduction" to Leaves of Grass (New York: Viking Press, 1959).

Knowing what books a poet has read sometimes helps us to understand the poetry. Malcolm Cowley, however, suggests that Whitman's Song of Myself should be placed beside a list of books he never read, some of which had not even been written when the poem was published. The books (e.g., Rimbaud's Illuminations, and Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra) are prophetic works, and Cowley's intent is to emphasize that Whitman was a poet in the prophetic mode. He goes on to argue that even though he had probably not read the key texts at the time, Whitman's work was substantially in agreement with the traditional tenets of Hindu doctrine.

It is in the eighth sequence, which is a sermon, that Whitman gives us most of the doctrines suggested by his mystical experience, but they are also implied in the rest of the poem and indeed in the whole text of the first edition. Almost always he expresses them in the figurative and paradoxical language that prophets have used from the beginning....

Whitman believed when he was writing "Song of Myself"—and at later periods too, but with many changes in emphasis—that there is a distinction between one's mere personality and the deeper Self (or between ego and soul). He believed that the Self (or atman, to use a Sanskrit word) is of the same essence as the universal spirit (though he did not quite say it is the universal spirit, as Indian philosophers do in the phrase "Atman is Brahman"). He believed that true knowledge is to be acquired not through the senses or the intellect, but through union with the Self. At such moments of union (or "merge," as Whitman called it) the gum is washed from one's eyes (that is his own phrase), and one can read an infinite lesson in common things, discovering that a mouse, for example, "is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels." This true knowledge is available to every man and woman, since each conceals a divine Self. Moreover, the divinity of all implies the perfect equality of all, the immortality of all, and the universal duty of loving one another.