Transcendentalism emerged in the 30ies. This time witnessed noticeable sharpening of capitalist contradictions. People began their strikes, workers uprising and unions helped the appearance of romanticists, who stood agains mercantalism. There began chasses after dollars. The new literary trend leaked upon the aesthetics of romanticism and it was a new branch of romanticism.
In 1836 there was founded «Transcendentalist Club» at the head of which stood Ralph Waldo Emerson. The members of the Club were Henry David Thorean (1817-1862), Teodore Parker, George Reeply, Amos Alcolt, Elizabeth Pibody, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) and others.
Transcendentalism is a specific American philosophical and literary trend.
To transcend something is to rise above it, to pass beyond its limits.
Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by senses. The transcendentalism believed that each and every man and woman living as a true individual, free from restrain dogma and dull habits of thought, could know something spiritual reality but could not know it through logic or the data of the senses.
Transcendentalists did not have a strict doctrine or code. This trend is more a tendency, an attitude, than it is a philosophy.
Nature played an impotant role in the trenscendentalist view. Nature was divine, alive with spirit, the human mind could read nature, find truths in it. To live in harmony with nature, to allow one^s deepest intaitive being to communicate with nature, was a source of goodness and inspiration.
The trnscendentalists believed that deep intaition of a stiritual reality is available to us only if we allow ourselves to be individuals, and Transcentalist writing places a strong emphasis on individualism.
Trenscendentalists assert that the powers of the individual mind and soul are equally available to all people. These powers are not dependent upon wealth or background or education. We all have a potential equality as spiritual beings, and the divinity within each of us can be realized by the learned minister and the scholar. For Emerson every person can be a kind of poet, realising individual imaginative power.
Society, with its emphasis on material succes, is often seen as a source of corruption.
The tone of transcendentalism writing is often optimistic and aspiring. It frequently suggests that the individual, in hormony with the divine universe, can transform the world. The New England movement, as represented by Emerson and others, has characterized by the absence of a forcual system of thought, the exeltation of the spiritual in a general sense over the material, and the immanence of the divine all the creation, especially as set forth in Emerson's «Oversoul». Transcendentalists state that only practice, experience, the surrounding world form a person. They thought that a man is by birth inherent in undestending truth and errors, good and evil and that these ideas transcendental, i.e. they come to a man without experience. But the transcendentalists condemned the moral and the practice of bourgeois America, its ideals. Transcendentalism became a kind of a protest form of American intellegentia against aethetically pushing sides of capitalist progress in the USA.
Transcendentalists thought that the society would develop homoniously, if evry person did his best. At the same time the transcendentalists were anxious about the corruption of the American society, wallowed in mercenary calculations, which ignored spiritual interestes.
Rejecting Calvinism and the materialism of society, Emerson and Thoreau asserted their beliefs in deism, in individualism and self-reliance, and in the for national literature. These ideas, most clearly expressed in Emerson's «Nature» (1836) or «Self-Reliance» (1841) and in Thoreau's «Walden» (1854) or «Civil Disobedience» (1848), directly influenced three groups of writers:
The writers of the «American Renaissance», Hawthorne, Poe and Melvill, whose symbolic and imaginative works are however more pessimistic, dealing with the individual caught between his own values and those of society, (cf. Edgar Allan Poe's «Tales»; Nathaniel Hawthrone's «The Scarlet Letter» (1850) or «The House of the Seven Gables» (1851); Herman Melville's «Moby Dick» (1851).
Walt Whitman, the prophet and seer, the believer in democracy, in the vitality of man and in the necessary emergency of an American poetry («Leaves of Grass», 1855).
The Schoolroom or Household Poets, Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier, so called because of the tremendous popularity of their works which were read at home and in school. They often used historical themes, folk materials, and traditional forms such as the ballad (e.g. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's «Evangeline», 1847, or «The Song of Hiawatha», 1855); John Greenleaf Whitter's «Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyll» (1866); James Russell Lowell's «The Biglow Papers» (1846-1848), and «A Fable for Critics» (1848).
Philip Freneau (1752-1832)
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