Often regarded as the vanguard of the poetry foundation, Walt Whitman utilizes simplistic word choice and unconventional structure to enhance his poems’ sense of free will. Thus, he further injects the idea of embracing nature as it soothes the human soul. Whitman was often seen as the first “poet of democracy” as he does not only purposely utilize singularly American style but also uses common people as subject matter. However, Whitman was also renowned for his fondness in nature. He believes that nature was the “root of all beautiful things” (Russel). In Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronaut,” he deliberately points out the difference between “learning” implicitly from reasonable description and acquiring knowledge from personal experience, which connects back to his ultimate belief of transcendentalism-nature serves as the template of how to live a meaningful life (Russel). For Whitman, nature inspires and reflects the individualism that he aspires to embody and which he wishes for his fellow men. Like Thoreau, another influential transcendentalist, Walt Whitman contemplates the natural world deeply; even a simple blade of grass “provokes deep meditation about human origins and the meaning of life” (Smith). In “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronaut”, Whitman originally intended to place this piece of work in his Civil War Collection “Drum-Taps”, but found it more plausible in the “Leaves of Grass” collection because it somewhat differentiated from the intended theme of union, division, war, and death (Trudell). This shift was important because it reveals, in a way, what kind of poem it was to the poet-in this case, it represented his self and the “seed of his eternal self-expression” (Trudell). Whitman alludes that as much as we may alienate ourselves from the natural world, we cannot escape our connection to it; we were “born of dust”, he reminds the reader, and to “dust we