What is the root meaning of transcendentalism? What is another word for revival? What is the synonym of visionary? What do you call a visionary person? What is the word for forward thinking? How do you demonstrate forward thinking?
How do you describe a positive person? What is the word for positive or negative? That's because some of the most important texts of the movement were essays. Go figger! Through the essay form, writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson , Henry David Thoreau , and folks like 'em conveyed some of the most important ideas of the movement. In essays like Emerson's " Nature " or " Self-Reliance ," Transcendentalist writers sought to convince their audiences of their perspective on stuff.
The essay form fit this aim because essays could be published in periodicals or delivered as lectures, a double-whammy that helped in reaching wide audiences. But even though we may not think of the essay as a conventionally "literary" genre, the Transcendentalist writers turned it into an art form. The best Transcendentalist essays are as well crafted and eloquent as any poem or work of fiction out there.
Did you get that Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important Transcendentalist authors and also a brilliant essay-writer? This ShmoopTube clip can tell you a little more about his famous, huge, mind-blowing essay called "Self-Reliance. Why was it so powerful? The stuff he's got to say about injustice and his own imprisonment check out quotes 3 and 4 is pretty deep.
A lot of the Transcendentalist writers wrote poetry as well as essays. If essays allowed them to present their Transcendentalist ideas in a clear, coherent form, poetry allowed them to express the more mystical, more intuitive aspect of their ideology. Poetry, after all, is based on the power of imagery and language. Poetry is suggestive, and it allowed Transcendentalist writers to suggest the nature of the "truths" and insights that they tried to explicate in their essays, but which went beyond the rational mind.
The ultra-famous poet Walt Whitman was associated with the Transcendentalists. In his poem " Song of Myself ," we'll find a lot of emphasis on individualism, a common Transcendentalist theme.
Not to mention tons of self-celebration, whether you think that's an ego trip or some real pretty verse. Walt Whitman's poetry collection Leaves of Grass highlighted many of the Transcendentalists' favorite themes, including nature—and not just nature that Walt Whitman was taking a self-loving walk through. Worth a peek! The Transcendentalists believed that folks can understand truth through intuition.
That is, we don't arrive at truth by donning a lab coat, putting on goggles, and conducting an experiment in a lab. Well OK, maybe we can arrive at some scientific truths that way, but that's not what the Transcendentalists were out for. They believed that there's a whole realm of experience that is beyond logical or rational deduction.
And we're not just talking The Twilight Zone. According to the Transcendentalists, the only way to access that realm of experience and knowledge is to trust in our intuition.
Our inner voice. Our gut. So hey, why not believe? And as a bonus, we might even end up in Heaven. Or at least see some pretty waterfalls on the way. If you don't believe us, see the awe-inspiring quote 4 right up here. In " Walden ," Henry David Thoreau challenges us to question "common sense" and find a deeper, more intuitive sense of knowledge. See what he's got to say right here.
Everything, according to the Transcendentalists, is connected. The universe contains all of us, and each of us contains the universe in our soul. Isn't that like The Force? The second conclusion is that conceptual understanding of beauty is impossible for human beings. The Americans eagerly joined him in celebrating the rightness of moral action, the beauty of the world, and the majesty of God.
Emerson was a great admirer of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, both of whom he met when he traveled to Europe in Their romanticism was intoxicating to him, and he seems to have passed some of that intoxication to his friend Thoreau.
The British romantics shared the same love of beauty, morality, and God that animated both Kant and the American transcendentalists, but the romantics had developed a unique perspective on our relation to those realities. This perspective provided one of the central features of American transcendentalism. The British romantics saw tremendous beauty and goodness in the world.
At the same time, they saw that all of that goodness and beauty is flawed. Human beings often embody great virtues, but this is not always so. Sometimes their behavior is monstrous in its selfishness and cruelty. The sky, the meadow, and the rose are breathtakingly beautiful, but as time passes their beauty fades. This double vision of the romantics, although it did not betray any facts, nevertheless placed them in the uncomfortable position of both hating and loving the world.
To get out of their predicament, the romantics made a bold move. They set their sights on the perfect, which for them could exist only beyond the awful limits of the world.
Yet they could not forget that they were, as flesh and blood, inextricably tied to those very limits. Nor could they forget that it was those very limits that provided the precious glimpses of beauty and goodness, however degraded, that they cherished.
This was a great tragedy, they decided, and it was made even greater by the fact that it was inevitable. If you live in this world and you have enough humanity to love the good and the beautiful, you will be constantly assailed by the pain of falling short of those ideals. Yet, they suggested, the more the tragedy of life appeared to us in all of its inevitability and pain, the more beautiful life would be in our eyes.
Had they embraced this perspective at face value, the transcendentalists might have been cheered. As a sequence of random events, some good and others bad, life is arguably meaningless and not worth living.
But view it as a tragedy and life takes on a marvelous aesthetic unity. Anguish and tears become literary realities, beautiful in their significance and in the timeless moral lessons they convey.
But the transcendentalists were too pragmatic to embrace such an intellectual view of life. The world was too much with them, and although they never tired of translating facts into ideas, they could not shake the sense that facts were somehow more real.
Instead of cheering them up, their contact with romanticism ultimately saddened them. They fell in love with the perfect like good romantics, but they could find little beauty in the countless misfortunes that befell them. They felt betrayed by life. In Emerson, this feeling expressed itself in the form of sheer disbelief at the terrible things that happened to him.
In Thoreau, it created a thin layer of bitterness and resentment that never dissipated. Their influence contributed a longing for the perfect, one of the central features of transcendentalism in America.
The other side of this contribution, equally central, was a treacherous undercurrent of disappointment and sadness. The idealism of the American transcendentalists, like their morality and their love of beauty, took the form of practices before it became, as an afterthought, a sort of theory.
Emerson stood with his head between his legs and took note of the fact that this opened a very different reality. His long country rambles produced in him a profound feeling of the lawfulness and rationality of nature.
The passions that stirred in his breast often burst forth in the form of an essay or a poem. Looking at the world from different angles, delighting in the patterns nature manifests, and writing poetry or prose are idealistic practices in the sense that they give consciousness a kind of priority. In creating new experiences or ideas, we seem to create new worlds, and mind takes on a status close to that of a divinity.
The old familiar facts, when filtered through the categories of imagination, are given an almost miraculous appearance. We are free from their tedious and often sorrowful limits to roam at liberty in thought. For the transcendentalists, this freedom was almost always short-lived. This is because they felt they should ground their idealistic practices in a consistent theory. The freedom and satisfaction their practices provided, they reasoned, would be more secure if given an adequate theoretical backing.
Their reasoning may have been sound, but their attempt to ground their practices in an adequate theory had the opposite effect. They became tangled in theoretical problems that proved intractable, and this made engaging with ideas for the sake of the activity itself more difficult.
An ulterior motive for this engagement was always pressing on them. The ideas could not be fully trusted unless somehow it could be shown that they captured the inner nature of things. There were flashes of verification, as when Emerson dreamed he ate the world, but all too often it was consciousness that had to give way to the cold facts of existence.
The loss of his beloved wife Ellen Tucker, his cherished son Waldo, and his dear friend Thoreau signaled to Emerson that something alien to mind was at work in the world. What this alien something might be, the transcendentalists had no clear idea. Their idealism gave consciousness, rational principles, and human values the status of omnipotent governing powers.
Evil was that for which there would be compensation, or it was an instrument necessary for the creation of a good far greater than any that would have been possible without its use. It was, in short, thoroughly intelligible, just, and even benevolent: a low mood or a contradictory thought passing through the Oversoul for the sake of its ultimate enrichment.
Evil is good, or rather it has to be good if one takes the idealism of the transcendentalists at face value. Not even they were capable of doing this all the time, yet they had no means of understanding evil except through the lens of their idealism, nor would they have been comfortable viewing it through a different lens as a brute fact or an irrational power.
The only option for the transcendentalists was to live with one more evil, namely the fact that evil positively confounded their attempts to explain it. This made the evils they suffered that much worse, adding avoidable surprise and puzzlement to unavoidable pain.
Had they been content to practice their idealism without attempting to expound it, they might have saved themselves considerable grief.
Their idealistic practices alone do not give mind the kind of priority proper to a power, but they do give it a sort of valuational priority.
In lavishly applying the categories of imagination to the world and marveling at the results, we affirm the priority of consciousness and its products in the sense of loving them the most. Buell, Lawrence, Cameron, Sharon, Cavell, Stanley, Clebsch, William, Dewey, John.
Firkins, Oscar W. Friedl, Herwig, Reid eds. Goodman, Russell B. Grusin, Richard, Harding, Walter, Horsman, Reginald, Kateb, George, Lysaker, John T. Marshall, Megan, Matthiessen, F.
Miller, Perry, Myerson, Joel, Packer, B. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. Poirier, Richard, T. Poetry and Pragmatism , Cambridge, Mass. Porte, Joel, and Morris, Saundra eds. Richardson, Robert D. Sacks, Kenneth S.
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