Transcendentalist Poetry

1. TranscendentalistPoetry Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American Literature I Luciano Cabral www.uerjundergradslit.wordpress.com

2. Without Emerson’s inspirational essays on nonconformity, self-reliance, and anti-institutionalism, Henry David Thoreau’s and Margaret Fuller’s careers may have followed different paths; and without Emerson’s call for an American bard whose poetry “speaks somewhat wildly” in addressing the nation’s “ample geography”, [Walt] Whitman’s great poetry might never have been written […]. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Emerson’s […] skepticism toward historical Christianity was strengthened by his exposure to the German “higher criticism”, which regarded the Judeo-Christian Bible as a document produced in a specific historical time, rather than as the direct word of God, and interpreted biblical miracles as stories comparable to the myths of other cultures. Emerson was gradually developing a greater faith in individual moral sentiment and intuition than in revealed religion.

3. Emerson’s Philosophy TRANSCENDENTALISM a philosophical and literary movement which held that spiritual reality, discernible through intuition, transcended empirical or scientific knowledge (institutions). Plato European Romanticism Mind as actively (not passively) intuitive and creative

4. Emerson’s Philosophy Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” (Leaves of Grass) “If you want me again Look for me under your boot soles” Definition of NATURE “Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture. But his operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result”(from Nature, 1836)

5. Emerson’s Philosophy The Transparent Eyeball “Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by 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 circulate through me; I am part or particle of God”(from Nature, 1836)

6. Emerson’s Philosophy nonconformity Anti-institutional Focused on the present SELF-RELIANCE Self-culture Self-centered Self-trust INDIVIDUALISM “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men” (from American Scholar, 1837)

7. Self-Reliance (1841)