Leaders of Transcendentalist Movement

1. Major Leaders of
Transcendentalist
Movement
Prepared by Gopi Dervaliya

2. Personal Information
● Name : Gopi Dervaliya
● Roll no. 08
● Sem : 2
● Paper Name : The American Literature
● Paper no. : 108
● Paper Code : 22401
● Submitted to : S. B. Gardi Department of English-
M.K.B.U
● Email : gopidervaliya02@gmail.com

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Table of contents
Major Leaders of
Transcendentalist
Movement
Citation
Introduction
What is
Transcendentalism
Major
Transcendentalist
Values
Conclusion

4. Introduction
•The treatment of Transcendentalism by twentieth-century teachers of
literature and American history has followed a long tradition of focusing
primarily on the European and American cultural influences on its major
figures, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret
Fuller.
•Their work is seen as fitting into various Western currents such as
German Romanticism, Unitarian theology, neo-Platonism, and American
utopian thought.
•They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking
conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an
original relation to the universe”.

5. What is Transcendentalism ?
Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement centered around
spirituality that was popular in the mid-19th century. Key
transcendentalism beliefs were that humans are inherently good but
can be corrupted by society and institutions, insight and experience
and more important than logic, spirituality should come from the self,
not organized religion, and nature is beautiful and should be
respected.

6. Major Transcendentalist Values
•Individualism :
- They saw the individual as pure
- People were best when they were independent
•Idealism :
- Comes from Romanticism
- Importance on imagination, intuition and creativity
- They wanted to bring back a more “ideal”
•Divinity of Nature :
- Transcendentalists didn’t believe in organized religion
- They saw nature as sacred and divine
- Humans to have a close relationship with nature
- Humans shouldn’t try to change or improve nature

7. Major Leaders of Transcendentalist Movement
•Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803 - 1882)
•Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862)
•Sarah Margaret Fuller
(1810-1850)

8. Ralph Waldo Emerson
•An American essayist, poet, and popular
philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) began
his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but
achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author
of such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “History,” “The
Over-Soul,” and “Fate”.
•Drawing on English and German Romanticism,
Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson
developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology
of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-
improvement.

9. Continue…
•He brought together many of the original transcendentalists, and his
writings form the foundation of many of the movement’s beliefs.
•He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry
David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche,
who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of
poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity.
•The day before he published his essay “Nature” he invited a group of
his friends to join the “Transcendental Club” a meeting of like-
minded individuals to discuss their beliefs.
•He continued to host club meetings, write essays, and give speeches
to promote transcendentalism.
•Some of his most important transcendentalist essays include “The
Over-Soul,” “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar” and “Divinity
School Address.”

10. 'Self-Reliance' by Ralph Waldo Emerson
•Throughout the essay he discusses the
importance of individuality and how people
must avoid the temptation to conform to
society at the expense of their true selves.
•It also contains the excellent line “A foolish
consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored
by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
•Self-reliance and an emphasis on the
individual over community is a core belief of
transcendentalism, and this essay was key in
developing that view.

11. Henry David Thoreau
•Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817-May 6, 1862)
was an American essayist, philosopher, and poet.
•Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts and
died at the age of forty-four.
•Like that of his near-contemporary Søren
Kierkegaard, Thoreau’s intellectual career
unfolded in a close and polemical relation to the
town in which he spent almost his entire life.
•After graduating from Harvard in 1837, he struck
up a friendship with fellow Concord resident
Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay “Nature” he
had first encountered earlier that year.

12. Continue…
•Thoreau had intimate bonds with his family and friends, and
remained unmarried although he was deeply in love at least twice.
•Thoreau was a friend of Emerson’s who is best known for his book
‘Walden’. ‘Walden’ is focused on the benefits of individualism, simple
living and close contact with and observation of nature.
•Thoreau also frequently opposed the government and its actions,
most notably in his essay “Civil Disobedience.”
•Notable Quote:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the
essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and
not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” (From Walden)

13. "The Summer Rain" by Henry David Thoreau
•The poem describes the narrator's delight at being in a meadow
during a rainstorm.
•The poem frequently mentions the enjoyment that observing
nature can bring, and there are many descriptions of the
meadow such as,
“A clover tuft is pillow for my head/And violets quite overtop my
shoes”
•But Thoreau also makes a point to show that he believes nature
is more enjoyable and a better place to learn from than
intellectual pursuits like reading and studying.

14. Sarah Margaret Fuller
•Margaret Fuller was the daughter of a
Massachusetts congressman who provided tutors for
her in Latin, Greek, chemistry, philosophy and later,
German.
•Exercising what Barbara Packer calls “her peculiar
powers of intrusion and caress”.
•Fuller became friends with many of the
transcendentalists, including Emerson.
•In the winters of 1839–44, Fuller organized a series
of popular and influential “conversations” for
women in Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in Boston.
•She journeyed to the Midwest in the summer of
1843, and published her observations as ‘Summer on
the Lakes’ the following year.

15. Continue…
•’Woman in the Nineteenth Century’ (1845), a revision of her
“Great Lawsuit” manifesto in ‘The Dial’, is Fuller’s major
philosophical work.
•A well-known journalist and ardent supporter of women’s rights,
she helped cofound ‘The Dial’, the key transcendentalist journal,
with Emerson, which helped cement her place in the movement
and spread the ideas of transcendentalism to a wider audience.
•An essay she wrote for the journal was later published as the
book ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century’, one of the earliest
feminist works in the United States.
•She believed in the importance of the individual, but often felt
that other transcendentalists, namely Emerson, focused too much
on individualism at the expense of social reform.

16. Conclusion
By the end of the 1840s, many key transcendentalists had begun
to move onto other pursuits, and the movement declined. This
decline was further hastened by the untimely death of Margaret
Fuller, one of the leading transcendentalists and cofounder of
‘The Dial’.
Transcendentalism represents an important moment in a new
American consolidation of global religious awareness. Seeing
such strong connections that were so pervasive in one of
America’s most original intellectual movements—and with
‘Walden’ long-installed as part of the Western canon.

17. Citation
•Goodman, Russell. “Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, Stanford University, 2 Nov. 2018,
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/emerson/#Oth.
•Rockefeller, Lily. "Biography of Henry David Thoreau, American
Essayist." ThoughtCo, Feb. 17, 2021, thoughtco.com/biography-of-
henry-david-thoreau-4776988.
•Sarikas, Christine. “What Is Transcendentalism? Understanding the
Movement.” What Is Transcendentalism? Understanding the
Movement, 23 July 2019,
https://blog.prepscholar.com/transcendentalism-definition-
movement.
•Todd Lewis, Kent Bicknell. “The Asian Soul of Transcendentalism.”
Association for Asian Studies, 1 Oct. 2021,
https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/the-asian-

18. Thank you…