THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE & TRANSCENDENTALISM

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With this fiery challenge Ralph Waldo Emerson concluded his 1837 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Address, THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. As his words were received with great enthusiasm, Emerson argued not only for a new American culture, freed from European bondage, but also for a rebirth of an intellectual and artistic life that was inextricably bound up with the life of the spirit. Before long, Emerson and his circle of writers, reformers, and artists would christen those ideals which governed the spirit "Transcendentalism."

The Transcendentalists stood at the heart of The American Renaissance-- the flowering of our nation's thought in literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music in the period roughly designated from 1835-1880. Concentrated in Boston and Concord, MA, the home of many of the literary members such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, the Alcotts, Theodore Parker, Jones Very, George Ripley, the Peabody Sisters, and the Channings, Transcendentalism was far broader than a geographical phenomenon or a select club membership--though Ripley and Emerson had founded the Transcendental Club in 1836. Rather it was a faith shared by such diverse minds and such diverse places as those of Walt Whitman in Brooklyn or Emily Dickinson in Amherst or the Hudson River School of painters in New York; it was a visionary bent, a way of, as the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth had once described his mission, "of seeing into the life of things" that permeated the best of American thought and art throughout much of the 19th century. Even those artists of the American Renaissance who would find difficulty with the optimism of the Transcendentalists--Hawthorne and Melville among them--would be forced to focus on and respond to the existential issues the movement raised.

The term Transcendentalism was derived from the philosopher Kant, who called "all knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects." The roots of the American philosophy ran deep into German and English Romanticism. From German philosophers such as Fichte and Herder, it received its mystic impulse; from Goethe, Novalis, Jean-Paul, Heine, and the other great German Romantic poets it acquired its imagistic language and themes. Acquaintance with German thought, by and large, filtered through English translations--Coleridge and Carlyle's among the best--and acquaintance with these and the work of other English Romantics such as Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron enriched the Americans' perspectives as well.

American Renaissance Poetry

“The Voice of the Rain” by Walt Whitman

AND who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
I am the Poém of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely formed, altogether changed, and yet the same,
I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn,
And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own origin, and make pure
      and beautify it:
(For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfillment, wandering,
Recked or unrecked, duly with love returns.)

“A Noiseless Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

“'Nature' is what we see—” by Emily Dickinson

"Nature" is what we see—
The Hill—the Afternoon—
Squirrel—Eclipse— the Bumble bee—
Nay—Nature is Heaven—
Nature is what we hear—
The Bobolink—the Sea—
Thunder—the Cricket—
Nay—Nature is Harmony—
Nature is what we know—
Yet have no art to say—
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

F741A - Nature the gentlest mother is

Nature - the Gentlest Mother is,

Impatient of no Child -

The feeblest - or the Waywardest

Her Admonition mild -

In Forest - and the Hill -

By Traveller - be heard -

Restraining Rampant Squirrel -

Or too impetuous Bird -

How fair Her Conversation -

A Summer Afternoon -

Her Household - Her Assembly -

And when the Sun go down -

Her Voice among the Aisles

Incite the timid prayer

Of the minutest Cricket -

The most unworthy Flower -

When all the Children sleep -

She turns as long away

As will suffice to light

Her lamps -

Then stooping - bending from the Sky -

With infinite Affection -

And infiniter Care -

Her Golden finger on Her lip -

Wills Silence - Everywhere

THE LAKE —— TO —— (1827)

Edgar Allan Poe - 1809-1849

In spring of youth it was my lot

To haunt of the wide earth a spot

The which I could not love the less—

So lovely was the loneliness

Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,

And the tall pines that tower’d around.

But when the Night had thrown her pall

Upon that spot, as upon all,

And the mystic wind went by

Murmuring in melody—

Then—ah then I would awake

To the terror of the lone lake.

Yet that terror was not fright,

But a tremulous delight—

A feeling not the jewelled mine

Could teach or bribe me to define—

Nor Love—although the Love were thine.

Death was in that poisonous wave,

And in its gulf a fitting grave

For him who thence could solace bring

To his lone imagining—

Whose solitary soul could make

An Eden of that dim lake.