American Transcendentalism

Part I of Essay
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to from only 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" (Thoreau). was a literary and philosophical movement that emerg ....

Part II of Essay
.... to the Romanticism age (Reuben 2). The American landscape inspired the Transcendentalists' reverence for nature, which provided them with much of the sustaining language and metaphor of their philosophy. Among the chief proponents of , Ralph Waldo Emerson is widely regarded as its central figure and catalyzing force. Critics often cite his essay Nature and An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College as touchstones of the movement. His subsequent essays, journals, and poems are credited with giving further shape to i ....