Transcendentalism & American Renaissance

Transcendentalism&The American Renaissance

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

The Scarlet Letter (1850)The house of the Seven Gables (1851))

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864))

Leaves of Grass (1855)

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Civil Disobedience (1849)Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)

Nature (1836)Self Reliance (1841)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"The one common denominator of my five writers [...] was their devotion to the possibilities of democracy. [...]Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville all wrote literature for democracy in a double sense. They felt that it was incumbent for their generation to give fulfilment to the potentialities freed by the Revolution, to provide a culture commensurate with America's political opportunity."

F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman

R.W. Emerson, Nature (1836)

“The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.”“Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. [...] Build, therefore, your own world."“Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason [...]. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself."

H.D. Thoreau, Walden (1854))

“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.”“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”“All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.”

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (1892 version)

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.I loafe and invite my soul,I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,Hoping to cease not till death.Creeds and schools in abeyance,Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,Nature without check with original energy.

American Transcendentalism

“You ought to be ashamed, John! Poor, homeless, houseless creatures! It’s a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do! Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can’t give a warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, just because they are slaves, and have been abused and oppressed all their lives, poor things!” “But, Mary, just listen to me. Your feelings are all quite right, dear... but, then, dear, we mustn’t suffer our feelings to run away with our judgment; you must consider it’s not a matter of private feeling,—there are great public interests involved,—there is a state of public agitation rising, that we must put aside our private feelings.” “Now, John, I don’t know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow.”

(1852)

Edwin S. Porter, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903)

An example of Minstrel Show

“Minstrel performers often attempted to repress through ridicule the real interest in black cultural practices they nonetheless betrayed. [...] It was cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cultural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure.”

(1993)