The American Transcendental Period

1. The American Transcendental Period Mrs. Dibble’s Class

2. “The only way to have a friend is to be one,” – Emerson • “To be great is to be misunderstood,” – Emerson • “Life only avails, not the having lived,” – Emerson • “That government is best which governs not at all,” – Thoreau • “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away,” – Thoreau • “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” - Thoreau

3. Characteristics:A Transcendental View of the World • Everything in the world, including human beings, is a reflection of the Divine Soul • The physical facts of the natural world are a doorway to the spiritual or ideal world • People can use their intuition to behold God’s spirit revealed in Nature or in their own souls • Self-reliance and individualism must outweigh external authority and blind conformity to custom and tradition • Spontaneous feelings and intuitions are superior to deliberate intellectualism and rationality

4. Part of the Romantic Period – 1800-1850 • A reaction to a too rational Unitarian religious movement • Consider all characteristics of Romanticism and remember that no movement “just happened” - also remember that Romanticism was also going on in Europe • Nature is always going to be key

5. The Transcendental A-List – the members of the Transcendental Club in Boston • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Henry David Thoreau • Margaret Fuller • Theodore Parker • Bronson Alcott • William Ellery Channing • George Ripley • Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

6. Ralph Waldo Emerson – 1803-1882 • Born in Boston in 1803 to a family that was cultured but poor • Dad died when he was eight, but Mom took in boarders to make money • Family decided he would follow the eight generations of Emersons before him – he would be a minister. He reluctantly obeyed.

7. Cont. • Entered Harvard at fourteen • An indifferent student , read widely (philosophy and religion) • With hesitance, became a minister • Married his love – 17 year old Ellen Tucker who was already sick with T.B. • When she died, his skepticism in religion increased, he quit the church, went to Europe, and observed life.

8. Cont. • Came back to US in 1833, remarried, and supplemented his income by lecturing – “Let us unfetter ourselves of our historical associations and find a pure standard in the idea of man.” • Believed individual souls were part of something bigger – the Over-Soul • Due to his growing fame, Concord, Mass. became a Mecca for intellectuals who considered Emerson their guru. • Although his lectures are optimist, the death of his five year old son, Waldo, caused him to fall into depression and later he started to lose his memory

9. Most Noted Works • Nature • “…the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me, I am part and parcel of God.” • “If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” • Self-Reliance • “To be great is to be misunderstood.” • “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.”

10. Henry David Thoreau – 1817-1862 • Born in Concord; dad was a pencil-maker; mom took in boarders; he spent his free time in the woods, often with a fishing pole, seldom with a gun. • Went to Harvard; was eccentric (it was required to wear a black coat to chapel, so he wore a green one). • Got mediocre grades but read lots and was into the ideas of transcendentalism

11. On Walden Pond • Emerson offered Thoreau some of his land on Walden Pond and that is where he went to find a simple life. • Thoreau’s most famous work – Walden – spoke of his view that man’s most “vital facts of life” lay literally in their own back yards. • He protested the Mexican War, which he saw as an attempt to extend American slaveholding territory, Thoreau refused to pay taxes. • He helped escaped slaves make it to Canada and was a supporter of John Brown, the radical abolitionist who staged a raid at Harper’s Ferry. • His essay “Resistance to Civil Government” later inspired Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Salvadorian people transformed his ideas into their pursuit of civil rights. • Opponents of the Vietnam War adapted his idea’s on Civil disobedience when they burned draft cards, staged sit-ins, and demonstrated non-violently

12. Cont. • “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” • “The government is best which governs not at all.”

13. Others with Transcendental Ideas… • Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom’s Cabin • Louisa May Alcott – Little Women • Walt Whitman - poet • Emily Dickinson - poet

14. Harriet Beecher Stowe • Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the most influential book of the 19th century. It was the first book to sell a million copies and touched readers across the globe. • Uncle Tom’s Cabin is one of the most effective documents in American literature and helped fuel the Civil War • Stowe was the most famous American woman of her day.

15. Louisa May Alcott • Her dad had been friends with Emerson • Worked, like Whitman, as a nurse during the Civil War. There, she contracted typhoid, from which she never completely recovered

16. Walt Whitman 1819-1892 • Whitman created new poetic forms and subjects to fashion a distinctly American type of poetic expression • He rejected conventional themes, traditional literary references, allusions, and rhyme – all the accepted customs of the 19th century • He used long lines to capture the rhythms of natural speech, free verse, and vocabulary drawn from everyday speech.

17. Cont. • “I Hear America Singing” – catalog poem • Song of Myself – empathized with all people (black, Indian, women). Didn’t care about race or sexual orientation. • “O Captain, My Captain” – a tribute to the fallen Lincoln

18. Emily Dickinson- 1830-1886 “Success is counted sweetest By those who ne’er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need.

19. Cont. • An agoraphobic – afraid of open spaces – from age 23 until her death 33 years later – dressed only in white and never left her house (rarely her room). • Wrote nearly 2,000 poems in her lifetime, but published only seven – each anonomously • Her poems were published posthumously, by her sister Lavinia

20. Her poems were different… • They looked different – where were the sentences, the commas, semi-colons, the periods? Why all the dashes???? • Her poems didn’t rhyme – used slant rhyme • Her figures of speech were too striking for the day • Her ideas were too radical – she didn’t stick with warm and fuzzy topics. Favored startling images and outlooks. Paved the way for the Imagists of the 20th century.

21. Five Main Themes • LOVE • NATURE • FRIENDSHIP • DEATH • IMMORTALITY Considered one of the founders of Modern American Poetry