LITR 4232: American Renaissance

Sample Student Research Project, spring 2006

Amy Breazeale

American Renaissance Research Journal

The American Transcendentalism Movement

The Transcendentalism movement helped shape American literature. Rene Welleck states, “the ancestry of Transcendentalism includes almost the whole intellectual history of mankind” (Meese 5).  Many American Renaissance authors were influenced by Transcendentalism. “Many scholars have of course continued to emphasize the spiritual bases of the Transcendentalism movement and its impact upon American thought and culture” (Buell 12).  Ralph Waldo Emerson who is thought to be one of the foremost authors in this movement influenced Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson also read Margaret Fuller and Emerson’s works.  Emerson’s text Nature is considered the base text of American Transcendentalism.  “Transcendentalism, in a sense, is the natural religion of democracy, by virtue of its claim that divinity inheres in every human being and indeed in every particle of the universe” (Buell 168). Ideas such as religion, individualism, reason, and democracy are bases for this movement.  During the American Renaissance course we have been exposed to many vital authors such as Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and Fuller who explore the notion of transcendentalism.

 Through this journal I want to get a better idea of what and who is involved with this literary movement.  Just the name of the movement alone sparked my interest and I have always enjoyed being exposed to such authors.  I want to focus my research on authors whose transcendental works were based on ideas of politics and society.  As a future teacher it is imperative to understand the growing use of the Internet and its resources for our future students generation.  As a teacher I feel it is important that we guide students in the right direction to scholarly information found on websites and that is why I focus so much on the website reviews. 

Essay of Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism is a very distinct philosophical system.  Authors in this movement were dedicated life long readers. The height of the movement began in 1842.  Possible sources include Kant, Schelling, Coleridge, and the Orientals.  “Historically, New England Transcendentalism can be viewed as one of many instances of the widespread religious ferment which took place in America during the first half of the nineteenth century” (Buell 4).  Transcendentalism is an eclectic literary movement, which includes literature, sociology, philosophy, and religion.  Many of the authors had an individualistic outlook on transcendentalism.  Transcendentalists seek higher truth with regard to man’s relationship with the universe.  The main idea of Transcendentalism was higher Reason.  Other ideas incorporated include “spirit”, “mind”, and “soul”.  It is the survival of the intelligent restlessness.  There is no specific definition of this movement yet some transcendentalists believe it was an “inner light”, voice of God, or a spiritual cosmic force. (Buell 5)  they believed God was a source of truth, which was unchanging.  Transcendentalists ask “what has man?”.  Many would answer body, mind, soul, spirit, affections, mental, religious, appetite, and understanding religion. (Ellis 6).  “[Transcendentalist] has almost become a synonym for one who, in whatever way, preaches the spirit rather than the letter” (Gohdes 5).

Transcendentalists continuously wrote journals and shared their writings with other authors.  The Western Messenger and The Dial  were the first magazines to publish works that involved and incorporated transcendental ideas. “…The Western Messenger printed materiel from pens so renowned that this fact alone would supply sufficient grounds for its reaching ‘perhaps the highest point in the literary achievement of early Western magazines’” (Gohdes 19).  The Dial was published after The Western Messenger was introduced in 1840 to allow self-expression. “The purpose of both periodicals, to further the aims of religion, literature, and philosophy, was an identical as their youthful spirit of experiment and naïve disregard for tradition so characteristic of the whole transcendental movement” (Gohdes 28).

Correspondence is a key term in the transcendental movement.  Correspondence is when nature and the soul are in communication with one another.  It has a metaphysical background and argues that nature is physical and our perception brings it to life.  “Through the perception of correspondence, the mind penetrates the illusion of separation between internal and external, nature, man and God, visible and invisible, the particular and the universal”
(Meese 7).  The source of correspondence comes from Sampson Reed’s novel Observations on the Growth of the Mind.  Reed defines the term as, “the power of the imagination in apprehending reality and the infusion of spirit throughout the natural world” (Meese 5).  The idea of correspondence can be compared to the famous saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.  Correspondence allows the intellect to involve himself in a higher order of being and meaning.

Although the movement has such diverse aspects its authors are connected in certain ideas pertaining to transcendentalism.   Transcendentalism involves aspects of religion, politics, art, literature, and a higher spirit, which many of the authors touch on one or more of these central transcendental ideas in their works.  The multiplicity of ideas in this movement can reach a large audience of readers yet sometimes it can seclude some readers. The ideas and principals of transcendentalism influenced not only the writers of this time but also the future of American literature to this day.

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was a leading feminist intellectual of pre-Civil war America.  She was born in 1810.  She was the eldest daughter of a father who was a lawyer and a Congressman.  As a young lady she had a profound education and was also referred to as the most learned American woman.  She was interested in reading German literature, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Moliere. Like most Transcendentalists Fuller kept a journal.  “Certain passages in her journals are such deep revelations of the emotional drive behind the Transcendental movement, such uninhibited and even painful disclosures of the attitudes and terrors of the early nineteenth century, that they are indispensable—quite apart from Margaret’s own peculiar personality—to understanding of the frame of mind and of soul out of which came the Transcendental literature” (Miller 332).  She had a career in editing the literary magazine The Dial from 1840-1842. (Miller 31)  She supplied four critical essays to this publication.  “According to Emerson, Fuller ‘looked upon life as an art, and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art.  She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under the most fitting lights’” (Buell 91). She had a love for nature but did not include it in her texts.  She began to become a critic rather than a creator.  She began a career as a professional conversationalist.  “She saw herself as a catalyst for the women in her group, and at her ‘Conversations’ she attempted to guide and draw out the participants, to force them to realize the potential within themselves” (Myerson 1692).  She held a series of conversations in Boston during 1839-1844. Fuller’s literature had become more oral than written after becoming interested in her conversations.

 Edgar Allan Poe classified race as men, women, and Margaret Fuller.  Fuller was not the person to sit back and let things happen.  She took interest in women’s rights and wrote Women in the Nineteenth Century to comment on hypocrisy. (Myerson 1693) This was her first work and made a great impression.  The booklet was published in New York during 1845.  This text influenced the Seneca Falls Conference in 1848, which dealt with women’s rights and equality for all.  This booklet was Fuller’s critique on social structure while fighting for sexual equality. (Miller 457) Fuller claims that a woman is an “immortal soul” which mirrors the transcendental ideas of Emerson and Thoreau who believe in fighting to reach immortality.  “Like Emerson and Thoreau, Fuller makes use of foreign gods and Literature to prove the Transcendentalist view that spirituality "permeated all peoples," or in her case, all women” (Jackson, 51).  In Fuller’s Women in the Nineteenth Century she utilizes a mix of both political and transcendental views that she incorporates in the work. 

Margaret Fuller was a Transcendentalist who through her written and oral literature spoke out for equality and women’s rights.  Her works and another Transcendentalist Walt Whitman have common characteristics that are comparable.  Both authors have interest in politics and the rights of common American, which both reflect in each of their works.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman was born in 1819 in West Hills, New York.  He is considered on of the most influential poets today.  He was mainly self-taught in the aspect of education. After school he began careers in jobs such as a printer’s apprentice, editor of newspapers, journalist, and a teacher in Long Island schools.  He took quite an interest in politics, which was a source of much of his later literature. “Presenting himself as a model democrat who spoke as and for rather than apart from the people, Whitman’s poet was a breaker of bounds: he was female and male, farmer and factory worker, prostitute and slave, citizen of America and citizen of the world; shuttling between the past, present, and future, he was ‘an acme of things accomplished’ and an ‘encloser of things to be’” (Erkkila 2920).  Whitman and Fuller’s texts have many comparable aspects such as their passion for politics and rights interweaved in their works.  Much of Whitman’s work is very representative of the common American citizen.  He is a master at “encompassing the whole range of human consciousness” (Buell 327).  He incorporates the everyday life of the common American in his texts, which in some cases expand his audience.

            Throughout Whitman’s work as well as Fuller’s there is a distinct transcendental theme of politics. One of Whitman’s most famous works is “Songs of Myself” which is a representative poem that takes on the qualities of the street and everyday life itself.  It was a representation of all classes, genders, and races. (Bollis 93)  This was Whitman’s first and longest poem in his collection of texts entitled Leaves of Grass published in 1855. This poem is Whitman’s critique on current politics and the individual during his time. This poem exhibits, “[t]he poet’s conflict between separate person and en masse, between pride and sympathy, individualism and equality, nature and the city, the body and the soul, symbolically enacts the larger political conflicts in the nation, which grew out of the controversies over industrialization, wage labor, women’s rights, finance, immigration, slavery, territorial expansion, technological progress, and the whole question of the relation of individual and state, state and nation” (Erkkila 2921).  His style often spoke to the common people yet uplifted his ideas. “The sentences of Whitman’s prose move like the lines of his poems; they too feature catalogs, often punctuated with only dashes or ellipses” (Bellis 77). In section 15 of “Songs of Myself” Whitman utilizes the technique of cataloging to illustrate images of portraits of women and men.   

            Whitman uses a literary technique called cataloging which is a list of names, titles, or articles arranged methodically.  “Songs of Myself” is one work of Whitman’s where he incorporates the use of this technique.  Cataloging became popular in America due to its “democratic technique”.   “No element in Transcendentalist style is more responsible for its appearance of anarchy than what is generally called enumerative or catalogue rhetoric—that is, the reiteration of analogous images or statements in paratactic form, in prose or verse” (Buell 166).  Cataloging is often compared to political action and suggests equality. 

            Another political work of Whitman is “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” which can be compared to “Songs of Myself”. In this work Whitman turns to nature for representation.  Nature is a key symbol in the transcendental movement. Whitman develops symbolism as a technique such as lilacs and birds to represent human objects and death.  “’Songs of Myself’ treats death and life simply as aspects of a continuous whole, the line between them erased by the shift from individual to collective experience” (Bellis 167).  Like “Song of Myself” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” has a major theme of death while incorporating politics in the text. “When Whitman seeks once again to recover and restore national unity, he will do so not as a revolutionary poet, but specifically in response to death, as elegist” (Bellis 117).  This work surrounds the idea of Lincoln’s death and he focuses on the national crisis as a whole.  “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is mournful poem grieving the dead yet Whitman does not individualize the poem. Instead Whitman shows the grief and angst of the nation. Specifically Whitman never puts a specific character or group into focus but rather incorporates an empty signifier, which allows the reader to perceive it on his or her own. Both poems have a strong theme of death but also focus on other transcendental aspects, which proves how eclectic the works from this movement are. 

Both transcendental authors Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman have many common characteristics in their works.  Both writers are representative who speak out on issues that reflect on their society. The authors bother have a political point of view running throughout some of their texts.  Like Fuller, Whitman often speaks through women’s voices.  Throughout both writers texts readers are able to distinguish the transcendental elements of politics, nature, and individualism.

 Useful Website Reviews

I wanted to first start this section out to explain the importance of this topic of my journal.  An increasing amount of students today utilize the Internet to find resources for their research.  I believe it’s imperative that teachers give the students the adequate information on finding reliable sources on the Internet.  I feel that teachers should scaffold the students learning on the Internet so they are modeled good websites so they are able to differentiate the scholarly website between a personal one.  Setting structure for use of Internet websites will allow your students to use the Internet to its full potential, which allows students to learn more facts about their topic of research.

The Transcendentalists

www.transcendentalists.com

This literary website is packed full of imperative information for anyone studying transcendentalism or the authors who were involved with the movement.  The site is very in-depth with background information with definitions and summaries to help guide the researcher. The website features links to other vital websites that contain further research on main authors such as Emerson and Thoreau.  One section called “Others in the Circle” focuses on other Transcendentalist who we have not studied as in-depth in the course.  Some authors included are Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Theodore Parker.  The site has a discussion area, which is very valuable when a researcher is stuck and needs other points of views and perspectives.  One of my favorite sections of this website includes the “A Quote” section.  It will give you a new random quote each time you refresh from a Transcendentalist.  This could be helpful when looking for a quote to use in a paper or a presentation. 

Overall the site is very useful and easy to navigate with many links to other helpful websites.  The different types of sources that are used on this website will help the research get a larger picture of the Transcendental movement.

American Transcendentalism: An Online Travel Guide

http://www.shepherd.edu/transweb/travelguide.html

This website is much like the website we utilize in our American Renaissance class each day.  The website was made by students and faculty at Shepherd College in West Virginia. At the top of the page you can navigate your way through different transcendental locations such as Maryland to visit Fredrick Douglass and his thoughts or New York to learn about Walt Whitman.  From these links you will indulged with information, facts, and pictures from these authors’ homes and texts.  As the title of the website explains this is like an online travel guide to all the Transcendentalists’ real lives.  Along with facts, researchers are able to browse through current students works from the courses they are taking at Shepherd College just like our current UHCL website.  I found it interesting how close our presentations matching theirs.  The website gives a great list of links and resources which can be very practical to a student researcher.

One point of interest for both students and teachers are the webquests .  A webquest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which all of the information used by students is online. Examples of provided webquests are “Thinking Like a Transcendentalist”, “Abolitionism and Frederick Douglass”, and “Henry David Thoreau and Nature Writing”.  These webquests are valuable activities where students are taking to different websites to answer questions and/or find research on a given topic.  Teachers can incorporate these web based research activities in the classroom to show students how to find scholarly information.  These webquests also give students information from different perspectives. 

 This website gives the reader a variety of aspects to search for facts on Transcendentalists.  The information is not just text so the viewer is given a range of mediums to use in their research. I would highly recommend this website for both instruction in the classroom and for research on this movement.

Throughout my journey of transcendentalism movement I have come upon fascinating authors and information.  This further knowledge has increased my awareness of other literary movements in the American Renaissance.  It is interesting how one movement can be so eclectic and has such a vague definition but still is connected as one.

Work Cited

Bellis, Peter J. Writing Revolution: Aesthetics and Politics in Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau. London: The University of Georgia Press, 2003.

Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. London: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Ellis, Charles Mayo. An Essay on Transcendentalism. Florida: Scholars Facsimiles & Reprints, 1954.

Erkkila, Betsy. “Walt Whitman 1819-1892.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature.  Comp. and ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. 2920-2923.

Gohdes, Clarence L. F. The Periodicals of American Transcendentalism. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1931.

Jackson, Carl T. The Oriental Religions in American Thought. Greenwood Press: London, 1981.

Meese, Elizabeth A. “Transcendentalism: The Metaphysics of the Theme.” Academic Search Premier. Douglass College, Rutgers University.15 Mar. 2006.

Miller, Perry. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Myerson, Joel. “Sarah Margaret Fuller 1810-1850.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature.  Comp. and ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. 1692-1694.