how is one writers work both a natural product of and a departure from the ideas of a specific literary movement in america literature?

Walt Whitman's work is continuation of and a departure from the work of transcendentalist authors of USA.

Explanation:

Walt Whitman is the most well known and most widely read poet from the USA and has been an influential figure for the development of the modern poetry.

He very much developed his poetry style and subject matter from the work of transcendental authors before him which includes Emerson, Hawthorne and Longfellow, who had a peculiar way of life and wrote a form of poetry.

The poetry that Whitman wrote continued the tradition of hermit meditations of the poet but were markedly different in their use of free verse and more free diction as well as heavy symbolism.