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Transcendentalism: The American Form of Romanticism

“I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

Transcendentalism was the major American philosophical and literary movement of the mid-nineteenth century, and one of the most influential expressions of Romanticism in the New World. Flourishing in the New England of the 1830s and 1840s, the Transcendentalists adapted the German Idealist philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, the English Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the new American experience of nature, democracy, and individual self-reliance into a distinctly American vision. The major figures — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and many others — gave American thought and literature a powerful philosophical and spiritual direction that has shaped the country ever since.

What follows is a map of the movement — its origins, its leading figures, its central ideas, and its long influence.

The Origins of Transcendentalism

The Transcendentalist movement grew out of a fertile late-1820s New England intellectual culture, especially the circle around the Boston preacher William Ellery Channing, whose “liberal Christianity” emphasized the inner, individual, spiritual dimension of religious life. In the early 1830s, a group of young Boston-area intellectuals — Emerson, Ripley, George Putnam, Frederic Henry Hedge — began meeting in informal discussions of the new German philosophy and the new English Romantic literature. In 1836, this informal group founded a club, the Transcendental Club, and the name “Transcendentalism” soon came to describe the broader movement.

The Transcendentalists drew on several intellectual sources:

German Idealism — the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, with its emphasis on the constructive power of the mind, the limits of empiricism, and the higher truths of reason and intuition.
English Romanticism — the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, with its reverence for nature, feeling, and imagination.
Eastern religious traditions — especially the Hindu and Buddhist texts, which several of the Transcendentalists read in translation and which contributed to their sense of the inner, contemplative, universal dimension of religious experience.
Neoplatonism and the Western esoteric tradition — including the Cambridge Platonists, Emanuel Swedenborg, and the ancient Neoplatonists, all of whom had emphasized the inner light and the higher, spiritual realities behind the world of appearance.

The Major Figures

The major Transcendentalists include:

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) — the central figure of the movement. Emerson’s essays — Nature (1836), “Self-Reliance” (1841), “The American Scholar” (1837), “Experience” (1844), “Circles” (1841) — gave Transcendentalism its most powerful expression, and his later collected essays are among the great works of American thought.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) — author of Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) and the essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849). Thoreau is the most widely read of the Transcendentalists, and his insistence on the value of deliberate, simple, nature-attuned living, and his principled resistance to unjust laws, have been enormously influential.
Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) — author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), the first major American feminist work, and a brilliant literary and cultural critic. Fuller edited the Transcendentalist journal The Dial and was a major figure in the Italian revolution of 1848–49, dying in a shipwreck on the return voyage.
George Ripley (1802–1880) — the founder of the Brook Farm utopian community, a major Transcendentalist intellectual, and the literary critic of the New-York Tribune.
Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) — the educator, philosopher, and father of the novelist Louisa May Alcott.
Theodore Parker (1810–1860) — the great Boston preacher and abolitionist, one of the most powerful Transcendentalist orators.
Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, William Henry Channing, and many others — all contributed to the rich intellectual life of the Transcendentalist circle.

The Central Ideas

Several ideas recur in Transcendentalist writing:

The primacy of the individual — the conviction that the individual human being has direct access to ultimate truth, and that no institution, no tradition, no authority can substitute for the inner voice of the self.
The correspondence between nature and the human mind — the conviction that the natural world is not a dead mechanism but a living system of meaning, and that the human mind can read in nature the same truths that it discovers in itself.
Self-reliance — the conviction, most powerfully stated in Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance,” that the individual must trust the inner voice and not be deflected by conformity, tradition, or the expectations of others.
Reform and the perfection of the human condition — the conviction, drawn from the more millenarian aspects of the Romantic inheritance, that human society is moving toward a higher state, and that the individual must do all in his or her power to advance this movement.
The Oversoul — the Emersonian concept of a universal mind or spirit that connects all individual minds and through which each person can have direct access to ultimate truth.
The higher law and civil disobedience — the conviction, most powerfully stated in Thoreau’s essay, that there is a higher law than the law of the state, and that the individual has a duty to disobey unjust laws.

The Brook Farm Experiment

In 1841, several leading Transcendentalists — most prominently George Ripley and his wife Sophia — established a utopian community at Brook Farm, near Boston. The community was intended to combine intellectual cultivation with manual labor, to be a model of just and cooperative social life, and to give the Transcendentalist ideals a concrete social embodiment. The experiment lasted until 1847, when financial difficulties and the failure to attract a sufficient membership forced its closure. The Brook Farm experiment, despite its failure, has been a model for many later intentional communities and continues to be a subject of scholarly interest.

The Transcendentalist Periodicals

The Transcendentalists published two important journals that gave the movement a public voice:

The Dial (1840–1844) — edited first by Margaret Fuller and then by Emerson, the journal published essays, poetry, and translations from the German idealists. It is one of the most important American intellectual journals of the nineteenth century.
The Massachusetts Quarterly Review (1847–1850) — edited by Theodore Parker, with contributions from many of the Transcendentalists.

The Long Influence of Transcendentalism

The Transcendentalist movement has had a remarkable long influence on American thought and culture. Its emphasis on the individual, on nature, on self-reliance, on reform, and on the higher law has shaped the American civil religion, the American environmental tradition, the American tradition of civil disobedience (from Thoreau to Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.), the American tradition of nature writing (from Thoreau to John Muir to Rachel Carson to Wendell Berry), and many other aspects of American life.

The Transcendentalist conviction that the natural world is a system of meaning, that the human being has a higher spiritual nature, and that the work of culture is to bring these truths into clear expression — these remain powerful and pervasive in American thought. To study Transcendentalism is to study one of the most important intellectual traditions in American history.