The transcendentalist perspective on life, as defined by Walt Whitman and Durand through their creative and artistic mediums, is an eternal and unbroken cycle that is void of a strict beginning or an absolute end. ... The illusion that both are separate is a misconception that Walt Whitman seeks to rectify through the sixth poem by stating that "all goes onward and outward, nothing collapses" (Line 37). ... The interaction between the boy and the narrator in Whitman's poem serves as a reminder of the fact that life is meant to be experienced with others, "fetching it to me ...

• Word Count: 799
• Approx Pages: 3
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Margaret Fuller, who was also a transcendentalist, had radical beliefs about the roles of women and desired for there to be drastic change in women's rights. Finally, Walt Whitman, who wrote in free verse about topics that no one else was writing about, believed in equality and pushed for democracy and individualism. Writing in the Nineteenth Century, Romantics such as Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Whitman had radical beliefs about the individual's role in society for their time period. ... In this essay, Emerson expresses "a central doctrine: divinity [existing] intimately in ...

• Word Count: 1963
• Approx Pages: 8
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, written in 1941. Matthiessen was influential in determining the canon of American writers from this period: Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. ... In fact, there were a number of stories circulating which focused upon sexually transgressive clergymen, and this may have been an influence on Hawthorne's portrayal of Arthur Dimmesdale. ... The political influences on American romanticism include 18th century notions about human perfectability, the ideals of American democrac...

• Word Count: 917
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Many aspiring authors, such as Poe, Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson, found notoriety with their writings. ... The exact origins of Romanticism are still in debate today, but it is generally agreed upon that it came about as a challenge to the Age of Enlightenment (1660s-1780s). ... The fact that Romanticism elevated the masses through democratic means meshed well with American ideals, though in truth it was only white males who saw themselves elevated. ... Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allen Poe became well-known advocates of Romantic ideals. Their writings had a unique style, often...

• Word Count: 1786
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

In doing so, critics continue to mistake the fact that Emerson offers in his later work and its focus on metonymy something of a "counteraesthetics" to his own earlier conception of metaphorical nature. (11) In this later work that conceives of a natural history or natural method of mind in organic, biological relation to matter, a conception informed by changing views of both matter and mind found in the nineteenth-century natural science he observes in his writings, Emerson revises his poetics of transcendental idealism by shifting the rhetorical grounding from metaphor to metonymy. ... Emer...

• Word Count: 9971
• Approx Pages: 40
• Grade Level: Undergraduate