weekly response 6

Rilee Erickson

Period 2

Weekly Response 6

 

Transcendentalism

 

    Transcendentalism is any system of phylosphy that emphasises a intuitive and spiritual above. The major people that were involved in Transcendentalism were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in their writings you could really tell what they and other philospehers were by how strongly they felt about the things that they were rebelling against, this is how most Transcendentalists can be understood throughout their context. Many people view these Transcendentalists as very educated people that were troubling themselves about defining spirituality and religon that took into perspective the new finding of their time. They lived in the time after the American Civil War, they were mostly New Englanders that centered around Boston and more towards that area. Their main focus was to create a main focus of American literature through their writings. They wanted to make a new form of literature that was entirely different from those of England, France, or Germany. Ralph Waldo Emerson put into account what the Transendentalists were trying to pursue by saying, "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." Although in this time there were more men than women pursuing this new form of literature there were also quite a few women Emily Dickinson, whose poems are still famous to this day, and Margaret Fuller were just some of the women that helped with the motion of Transcendentalism writing. If it hadn't have been for all these writers we would not have the same literature that is being taught in school everyday.