Do you know what Transcendentalism is? It's most likely that you have never even heard of the word transcendentalism. Don't feel bad though because it is s very hard word to spell and it is a hard topic to understand. It's also hard to understand the literary authors who followed this transcendentalists movement like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay called Nature. From the title you can probably guess what the essay is about. We can guess that he uses a bit of the romanticism of nature. How does this literary work of his reflect his own beliefs? How do we see his beliefs in the essay Nature? Well to be able to answer both of these questions about him we first have to know what Transcendentalism is. What is Transcendentalism? …show more content…
He was one of the influential Transcendentalists in American literature. Let's look at his life to see how he got to become one of "Transcendentalists most powerful spokesman"(Emerson 197). Emerson was born in a family of New England ministers. After he graduated Harvard he entered the Unitarian ministry. He was ordained as assistant minister of Boston's Second Church. This was Boston's prestigious Unitarian church. He started having doubts about the creed and rites of the church, and as they increased he found himself moving toward rejection of the Unitarian ministry. The death of his wife is what finally pushed him over the edge, and in 1832 he resigned from the church. For the next three years he traveled throughout Europe, and meet famous men like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is probably where he really started believing his Transcendentalist beliefs. He believed that people were naturally good and there was no limits to what they could do. He returned back to the states in 1834, and remarried. He went into lecturing and writing. The decade of 1835-1845 was the most important for him; in which he published works that defined the transcendental spirit. This is when he wrote an essay called …show more content…
This essay launched the Transcendentalist movement into American philosophy. This essay represented at least ten years of intense study in philosophy, religion, and literature, and in his First Series of essays (transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu Ralph Waldo Emerson). How does this work reflect his Transcendentalist view? Let's first see how Emerson views nature. He says "Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient." Emerson is saying here that Nature can change. The unchangeable part of nature is only the absence of us. We control nature. Nature listens to us. This definitely reflects the Transcendental views of when we obtain the knowledge and become one with God. What does Emerson say about us being our own authority? He says "Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will