Transcendentalism
1840-1860
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Elissa Ku
Michael Deo
Paulo S
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Taylor Thomas
Rachel Lee
Luis Diaz
Objective
To understand the historical
background that led to
Transcendentalism
 To identify the styles of
Transcendentalism
 To analyze Transcendentalism works
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Transcendentalism
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A nineteenth-century movement in the
Romantic tradition, which held that
every individual can reach ultimate
truths through spiritual intuition, which
transcends reason and sensory
experience.
Historical Context
Transcendentalism 1840-1860
 Conflict over slavery
 Treatment over Native Americans
 Reform Movement
 Lyceum Movement
 Economic downturns
 During this time of instability,
transcendentalism appealed to audiences
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Values and Belief
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Held that every individual can reach
ultimate truths through spiritual intuition,
which transcends reason and sensory
experience.
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Belief that all of nature is symbolic of the
spirit
• Walden- “Brute Neighbor”
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Belief of an optimistic view of the world as
good and evil as nonexistent.
• Anti-Transcendentalism—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Genre and Style
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Mostly wrote poetries, short-stories, novels,
and essays.
• Wanted to redefine writing to become an American
writer
• Wanted to reform education and society
• Focus that God can be reached through mediation
and nature
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Intuition is our capacity to know things
spontaneously and immediately through our
emotions rather than our reasoning abilities
• Contrasts rational thinking
Continue Genre and Style
Spiritual Intuition: the guidance of a spiritual
force perceived as the intuition of an
individual
 Rhetorical Devices Used:
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• Imagery: words that appeal to senses
• Ex: Lines 170-175 “own breast was all torn away…dark
carbuncles of the sufferer’s eyes”
• Metaphor: comparison between two unlike things
• Ex: Extended metaphor: red and black ants fighting
• Allusion to God
• Ex: Line 158 “Fire! For God’s sake fire!”
Significant Authors and Works
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“Nature” –Essay
“Self-Reliance” –Essay
“The Apology” –Poem
“Fate” –Poem
Henry Thoreau
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Walden- Autobiography
“Civil Disobedience”Essay
Father of Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Highlighted Passage
Self-Reliance -Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a time in every man’s education when he
arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that
imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for
better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide
universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn
can come to him but through his toil bestowed on
that plot of ground which is given to him to til.
Guided Practice
The Fate –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Deep in the man sits fast his fate
To mould his fortunes, mean or great:
Unknown to Cromwell as to me
Was Cromwell's measure or degree;
Unknown to him as to his horse,
If he than his groom be better or worse.
He works, plots, fights, in rude affairs,
With squires, lords, kings, his craft compares,
Till late he learned, through doubt and fear,
Broad England harbored not his peer:
Obeying time, the last to own
The Genius from its cloudy throne.
For the prevision is allied
Unto the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that awaits
Is the same Genius that creates.
The Apology –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Think me not unkind and rude
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.
Tax not my sloth that I
Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
Writes a letter in my book.
Chide me not, laborious band,
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand
Goes home loaded with a thought.
There was never mystery
But 'tis figured in the flowers;
Was never secret history
But birds tell it in the bowers.
One harvest from thy field
Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield,
Which I gather in a song.
Write a paragraph
about the poem
including two
major points of
transcendentalism
style and
definition. It would
be graded on a 3
point scale.
Recommended Websites and
Textbook Passages
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Orange Literature Book
Overview of Transcendentalism pg 206-209
 Ralph Waldo Emerson pg 238-247
 Henry David Thoreau pg 252-273
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http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalis
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