Topic > Transcendentalism and its representatives

Henry David Thoreau was a famous American transcendentalist who turned to his environment for inspiration. Thoreau built a cabin on Walden Pond and lived there alone for just over two years before publishing his book, Walden, which was about his time living in isolation and his changing feelings about society. He wanted to live a simple life and believed that the government should not exist because it forced people to conform. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In the one year Thoreau spent at Harvard, he wore a green coat instead of the required black coat, proving that no one who controls him would allow it. He also wrote Civil Obedience, a personal account of his time in prison for refusing to pay taxes that helped support the Mexican-American War. He encouraged everyone to ask themselves if they had any doubts. Before his death in 1962, Thoreau continued to defend his beliefs by helping slaves escape to Canada for freedom. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “father of transcendentalism,” was the leader of the transcendentalist movement in the mid-19th century. He was a thinker ahead of his time, anti-slavery, and emphasized self-reliance, optimism, self-improvement, self-reliance, and freedom. Emerson contributed to The Dial, a leading magazine for transcendental beliefs. He became first a teacher and then a minister who rejected Calvinism, the theological system of John Calvin and his followers characterized by a strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God, the depravity of mankind, and the doctrine of predestination. He absorbed the Christian religion of Unitarianism: the belief that there is only one God, not the Trinity (Mother, Father and Holy Spirit). A major turning point in his life was the death of his wife, which led him to question his faith and leave the pulpit. He continued to believe in the divine and commonly referred to it in his writings. Emerson believed that humans were born with a divine way of thinking and that the human mind was the most important force in the universe. In 1833, Emerson conceived the idea of ​​the oversoul, a universal spirit to which all beings return after death or, in other words, every being is a part of the mind of God. Emerson's work continued to influence many other famous thinkers transcendentalists, such as Thoreau, Alcott and Fuller. Margaret Fuller was a social reformer, leader in the women's movement, and a transcendentalist in the 1840s. He edited The Dial, a popular transcendentalist magazine, for two years until Emerson took over. It was aimed at people who wanted “perfect freedom” and “progress in philosophy and theology.” Fuller published Women in the Nineteenth Century, proclaiming that a new era was changing relationships between men and women. His philosophy begins with the principle that all people can develop a life-affirming relationship with God. In 1948 she finally became a literary critic for the New York Tribune and traveled to Italy to report on the revolution. Margaret Fuller's story is so inspiring to me because people believed that she couldn't succeed because she was a woman, but she definitely proved them wrong when she became the first woman to display her transcendental beliefs. Walt Whitman was the publisher of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, although it did not fit in well due to his disagreement with the Democratic Party and his overly radical editorials. Qualities of Whitman's style included free verse poetry, the use of catalogs (listing things), the,.