In 1855 the American poet Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, and at its centre stood a long poem that begins 'I celebrate myself'. Whitman made the individual self enormous — porous to the whole universe, equal to it, unashamed of its body and its appetites — and out of that expanded self he built a vision of democratic fellowship.
Set Whitman beside Iqbal and the rhyme is hard to miss. Both are, above all, poets of the self. Both write to enlarge the reader, to wake a sleeping sense of one's own scale and worth. Both reject the small, the timid, the merely conventional life. Comparative scholars have long paired them as Eastern and Western singers of selfhood, and the pairing holds.
But the two selves are built differently. Whitman's self expands by merging — it contains multitudes, flows into the crowd, dissolves the boundary between one person and all persons. Iqbal's self grows by intensifying — Khudi becomes more sharply itself, more distinct, the closer it comes to its source. Whitman's self is a great open embrace; Iqbal's is a tempered blade.
Reading them together does something useful. It shows that the modern hunger to take the individual seriously — to treat an ordinary human life as vast and significant — surfaced independently on opposite sides of the earth, in a Brooklyn printer and a Punjabi philosopher. Iqbal is not a local curiosity. He is one voice in a worldwide chorus, and Whitman is another singing the same note in a different language.