The philosophies and literature of the Transcendental movement differ from Romantic qualities more in degree than in kind. American Transcendentalism was a concise moment, both in geography and time. Arising from a faction of the Unitarian denomination that felt its theology did not place enough emphasis on the role of intuition in religion, this movement is typically dated as starting in 1836 with the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on “Nature” and gradually faded as an active movement at the approach of the American Civil War, with the exception of Walt Whitman.

Nearly all of Transcendentalism’s proponents lived in Boston or Concord, Massachusetts. Concord was the first rural artist’s colony, and the first place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism. It was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living (Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both had vegetable gardens). Emerson, who moved to Concord in 1834, and Thoreau are most closely associated with the town, but the locale also attracted the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the feminist writer Margaret Fuller, the educator (and father of novelist Louisa May Alcott) Bronson Alcott, and the poet William Ellery Channing. The Transcendental Club was loosely organized in 1836 and included, at various times, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson (a leading minister), Theodore Parker (abolitionist and minister), and others.

Although the Transcendental movement was relatively confined geographically, nonetheless Transcendentalism had an outsized impact on the American intellectual conversation and on the literature produced during the latter half of the Romantic period. The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine, The Dial, which lasted four years and was first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson. Reform efforts engaged them as well as literature. A number of Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and some were involved in experimental utopian communities such as nearby Brook Farm (described in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance) and Fruitlands.

The movement was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each individual was thought to be identical with the world, a microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self-reliance and individualism developed through the belief in the identification of the individual soul with God.

Like prior Romantics, Transcendental writers also emphasized the supremacy of the individual, some to the degree that the individual was better off distancing himself physically or mentally from all other people, even family, to preserve the sanctity of self-reliance. Transcendentalists extended the Romantic kinship between human nature and the natural world, arguing that humanity and nature were all expressions of God (referenced under several different names like the Absolute Spirit or the Oversoul) and that nature served to guide humanity toward realization of that essential truth. Furthermore, Transcendentalists also agreed that the conduit to truth was within and located it particularly in intuition, a kind of knowledge prior to and superior to any Lockian sensory experience or reflections upon it.

Transcendentalism had an impact on American literary culture both directly and indirectly. Several of the best known American Romantics sneered at its beliefs. Poe roundly insulted several major Transcendental figures in his criticism and Melville included satiric versions of Emerson and Thoreau in his final novel The Confidence Man (1857). Nonetheless, even authors critical of Transcendentalism could not help but address some of its key concerns, either positively or negatively and sometimes both within the same work. In short, Transcendentalism introduced a series of pronouncements to which other writers of the period felt compelled to respond. Writers of the latter part of the Romantic period pondered questions of whether nature existed to teach us, whether we were capable of seeing past our biases to the truth, and whether it was possible or even desirable to live a life completely independent of others.

Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences – on the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. The American hero, such as Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic and/or Transcendental American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice – all at the same time. It is clear from the many masterpieces produced in the three decades before the U.S. Civil War (before 1861), that American writers rose to the challenge.

The following video explains American transcendental philosophy.

Two additional videos produced for high school audiences may also be useful, as they apply American transcendental philosophy to literature.