Transcendentalism

1. Transcendentalism

2. Transcendentalism • American • Literary, political, and philosophical movement • Developed during the late 1820s and 1830s, seen throughout the 1850s.

3. Transcendentalist Views • They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity. • Against typical conformity • They believed in the inherent goodness of both people and nature. • They had faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.

4. Notable Transcendentalists • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Henry David Thoreau • Nathaniel Hawthorne • Margaret Fuller

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882

6. Emerson • Born in Boston, Massachusetts • Started at Harvard College at 14 • After college, became a pastor at the Second Church of Boston • Moved around, staying in places including Florida and Europe, but returned to Massachusetts.

7. Nature • In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson published this essay anonymously. • In many ways, it was the foundation of transcendentalism, mostly due to the use of a non-traditional appreciation of nature within the essay.

8. Page 364: “Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period so ever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.” What is Emerson saying in this section? How does this quote fit into Transcendentalist views?

9. Page 364: “Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance… Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population. ” • How does this passage look at nature? • How does this passage look at man?

10. Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)

11. Henry David Thoreau • American author, poet, philosopher, historian, and leading transcendentalist. • Lived in Concord, Massachusetts. • Studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837. • Did not receive a degree

12. Walden • For two years, Thoreau lived alone in a cabin he built himself at Walden Pond outside of Concord. From his experiences during these years, he developed his most notable work, Walden (1854).

13. Page 374: “When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there… To my imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain which I had visited a year before. This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.”