Transcendentalism Image Courtesy Library of Congress

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TranscendentalismImage Courtesy Library of
Congress
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Key Figures

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
• Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894)
• Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
• Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

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Key Dates

• 1836 ? Transcendental Club is founded Emerson
  publishes Nature
• 1837 ? Emerson delivers The American Scholar
  to the Phi Beta kappa Society of Harvard College
• 1838 ? Emerson delivers The Divinity School
  Address at Harvard College
• 1840 ? Emerson publishes Self-Reliance
• 184041 ? Margaret Fuller edits The Dial

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Key Dates

• 184146 ? Brook Farm
• 1842 ? Margaret Fuller publishes Plan for the
  West Roxbury Community Brook Farm in The Dial
• 184244 ? Emerson and Thoreau edit The Dial
• 1845 ? Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the
  Nineteenth Century
• 1846 ? Thoreau jailed for refusing to pay the
  poll tax in protest of the Mexican War and
  slavery
• 1849 ? Thoreau publishes Civil Disobedience

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• The Transcendental Club
• Informal meetings of the Transcendental Club
  began in 1836 in Concord, MA, in the home of Rev.
  George Ripley for exchange of thought among
  those interested in the new views in philosophy,
  theology, and literature.
• Early members included Ripley, Emerson, Frederic
  Henry Hedge, Convers Francis, James Freeman
  Clarke, and A. Bronson Alcott. Later, they were
  joined by Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller,
  Orestes Brownson, Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody,
  William Ellery Channing, Jones Very, and others.

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• The Transcendental Club
• They called themselves The Symposium or Hedge
  Club, after Henry Hedge, who helped to initiate
  meetings.
• With good-natured ridicule, neighbors referred to
  them as Transcendentalists because of their lofty
  discussions.
• The intense individualism of the members
  permitted only the most informal of structures.
  There were no officers, no dues, no imperative
  meetings.
• The club sponsored two major activities The Dial
  and Brook Farm

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• The Dial
• The Dial, a quarterly publication, was issued
  sixteen times between 1840 and 1844.
• The first editor was Margaret Fuller (1840-41),
  followed by Emerson with the assistance of
  Thoreau (1842-44).
• The subscription list, small at the start,
  dwindled, causing The Dials demise.
• Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and other
  Transcendentalists introduced new poems and
  essays in The Dial.

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• Brook Farm (1841-1846)
• Brook Farm was established in 1841 on a 200-acre
  farm in West Roxbury, MA, as a Utopian community
  to foster self-realization.
• George Ripley was a leader in its founding.
  Among those who associated with Brook Farm are
  Theodore Parker, Channing, Hawthorne, Fuller,
  Charles A. Dana, and Albert Brisbane.
• Emerson did not participate in the social
  experiment, believing that he would be exchanging
  one prison for another, for in the arrangements
  at Brook Farm, as out of them, it is the person,
  not the communist, that avails.

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• Brook Farm (1841-1846)
• Struggling, Brook Farm collapsed in 1846 when the
  uninsured central building burned.
• Hawthorne satirized Brook Farm in his novel The
  Blithedale Romance (1852).

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• The social experiments of Brook Farm and
  Fruitlands (1843) were founded on the following
  transcendental principles
• self-realization and individual freedom
• fair labor, a sharing of benefits and burdens
• womens rights
• the abolition of slavery
• the belief that a human community could be
  supportive of the individual first and then the
  whole.

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• Transcendentalism and Romanticism
• Transcendentalism is at the heart of the Romantic
  movement in America.
• Transcendentalism energized an already lively
  movement.
• Transcendentalism influenced all major Romantic
  writers after 1840.
• Transcendentalism inspired many American authors
  to greatness, even those, like Hawthorne and
  Melville, who disagreed with many Transcendental
  theories and concepts.

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• Transcendentalism and Romanticism
• Like the Romantics, the Transcendentalists
• emphasized the importance of intuition over
  reason
• objected to the restraints of tradition and
  convention
• had a deep reverence for nature
• were anti-institution and anti-authoritarian
• believed in the dignity of the common person and
  common labor
• advocated social reforms and a national
  literature

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• Transcendentalism and Romanticism
• The Transcendentalists stressed individualism,
  perhaps to a greater extent than the Romantics.
• Individualism infused Transcendental concepts of
  politics, spirituality, social reform, and
  literature.
• Individuals are innately good and, for most
  transcendentalists, divinity dwells within.
• The individuals relationship with God was
  personal and did not require church
  intermediation or ritual.

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• Transcendental Individualism
• To know what is right, I need not ask what is
  current practice, what say the Revised Statues,
  what say holy men of old, but what say
  conscience? what God?
• Theodore Parker
• Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of
  your own mind.
• Emerson

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• Epistemology
• Transcendentalism can be studied as an
  epistemologya way of knowing.
• Most Transcendentalists believed that individuals
  can intuitively transcend the limits of the
  senses and of logic and directly receive higher
  truths unavailable through common methods of
  knowing and self-realization.

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• Emersons Transparent Eyeball
• In the woods, we return to reason and faith.
  There I feel that nothing can befal me in
  life-no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my
  eyes,) which nature cannot repair. 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 circulate through me I am
  particle of God.
• Emerson, Nature (p. 884)

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Key Facts about Transcendentalism

• Emersons transparent eye-ball
• The transparent eye-ball might be Emersons
  definitive image for the spiritual and
  self-reliant potential of the individual, as all
  boundaries (ego, body, things) are removed to
  unify the self fully with nature. He has reached
  an elevated state where God, nature, and he are
  one.

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Reading

• See The American Tradition in Literature 11e
• Read Transcendentalism (pp. 36264).
• Look through the Chronology (bottom pp. 299300).
• Read the headings and selections for Emerson (pp.
  365453), Fuller (pp. 46678), and Thoreau (pp.
  478560).
• Read the heading (pp. 898901) and selections for
  Whitman, especially Song of Myself (pp. 91555)
  and The Sleepers (pp. 97884).