John Stuart Mill's liberal individualism — the claim that the individual's freedom to develop their own character is the highest social value — runs through much Victorian poetry that celebrates the self's autonomy against social conformity, from Browning's dramatic monologues to the Aesthetes' celebration of individual style; Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance — the radical individualist claim that each person contains within themselves an adequate resource for truth and value — directly influenced Whitman's democratic individualism and the tradition of American poetry that celebrates the sovereign self; A poet writing about the tension between individual expression and community expectation might use individualism philosophically — exploring whether the individualist claim (the self as origin and authority) is a genuine insight about human dignity or a historical construct that serves particular social interests; Nietzsche's philosophy of the sovereign individual — who has overcome the herd morality of conformity and created their own values — informs the Romantic and modernist poetry of solitary genius, the artist who stands apart from and above the crowd; The philosophical tension between individualism and collectivism runs through political poetry — poets of the left tend to subordinate individual expression to collective voice and social solidarity, while poets of individualism (Whitman, Emerson, Wallace Stevens) treat the individual consciousness as the ultimate locus of value; Feminist philosophy's critique of liberal individualism — the claim that the individualist subject is implicitly masculine and implicitly disembodied, and that human existence is constitutively relational and interdependent — has influenced contemporary feminist poetry's emphasis on community, care, and the entanglement of selves