Major tenets of Transcendentalism:

Influences: A combination of Neo-Platonism, Romanticism, German Idealism. Moreover, a

reaction against New England Puritanism.

1. Idealism: another superior reality that is higher than (or transcends) our everyday life and
world. Nature is a revelation of the eternal in sensorial, empirical, things; nature as a
hieroglyph of Gods spiritual world; natural objects speak directly to the self, to the
individual mind and soul. The Oversoul and the human desire to merge with the
transcendent Self.

2. Emphasis on intuition as superior to reason and logic; intuition as the means to reach into the
hidden divine mystery of things, unveil their transcendent, ideal reality.

3. Optimism: mans unrestricted power to be in touch with both the natural and spiritual world.

4. Individualism and self-reliance: Emphasis on the individual rather than on society. One must
be true to his instincts and not to conform to what society dictates; the attempt to be true
to ones self and to ones identity. Secondly, individualism involves being self-reliant, to
trust thyself.

5. The role of the poet: the poet as someone who can see through the surfaces of everyday
things to reveal their spiritual significance. Emerson takes up the Romantic image of the poet as
prophet, as seer. The Poet (1844): Poets turn the world to glass.

Quotations:

I should have told them at once that I was a Transcendentalist- That would have been the
shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations, Henry David
Thoreau.
Standing on the bare ground, -my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite
space,- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all.
The currents of the Universal Being circulating through them; I am part or parcel of God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature.
It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact
is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not
reminded of the flux of things? Emerson, Nature.
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. The poet has a new thought: he has
a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the
richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the
world seems always waiting for its poet. Emerson, The Poet.
The poet has no definitions, but is commanded in nature, by the living power which he feels
to be there present It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the supernatural which he
worships. Emerson, The Poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

.American poet, essayist and philosopher.

.Born in Boston, Massachussets in 1803.
.After studying at Harvard and teaching for a brief time, entered the ministry. .Appointed to the
Old Second Church in his native city. Resigned in 1831.
.From 1832 to 1833 traveled in France, Italy, and England, meeting Thomas Carlyle and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. Drew on Carlyles to formulate his own philosophy.
.In 1835 married his second wife and settled in Concord, Mass.
.From 1842 to 1844 edited the Transcendentalist journal The Dial.
.Died of pneumonia in 1882.
Major works:
.Essays (1841)
.Essays: Second Series (1844)
.Poems (1847)
.Addresses and Lectures (1849)
.The Conduct of Life (1860)
.May-Day and Other Poems (1867)
Major issues and themes:
.Influential figure as a founding father. His address at Harvard, The American Scholar
(1837) said to be Americas declaration of literary independence; attempt to create a uniquely
American body of literature; believed it was time for literary independence. I look in vain for
the poet whom I describe.
.The chief proponent of Transcendentalism, the American philosophic and literary movement.
Emersons first book, Nature (1836), the first document, the manifesto, of this movement.
.In 1836 the Transcendental Club, which included Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David
Thoreau, began to meet. .Transcendentalists might be seen as a generation of well educated
people who lived in the decades before the American Civil War.
.The two Emersons; the latter phase in which there is a much profounder sense of the
complexities of human experience, a recognition of evil and of limitation; also, the darker side
of nature.

Bibliography

Augustyn, Adam. American Literature from 1600 through 1850s. New York: Britannica
Educational Publishing, 2011.
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Volume 2 1820-1865.
New York, Cambridge UP, 1995.
Gray, Richard. A History of American Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004
Paul Lauter ed. A Companion to American Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010.
Wayne, Tiffany K. Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism. New York: Facts on File, 2006.