Writers of the Late Romantic Period

            Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." This famous quote reflects the tension felt between the individual and society for some of the later Romantic writers and is apparent in their work. Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, firmly believed that the individual should separate from society's norms and institutions. 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.
             Ralph Waldo Emerson was a catalyst for thought and philosophy in the Nineteenth Century because he sparked the transcendentalist movement. It is because of this that he is "arguably the most influential American writer" of the eighteen hundreds, and many other writers and thinkers during the time "sought to come to terms" with him (Baym 211). According to Dr. Watson in her lecture titled "Emerson and Transcendentalism," Transcendentalism was a religious, philosophical, and literary movement which rejected Enlightenment empiricism and the thoughts of John Locke (Watson 17 Feb 2015). Transcendentalists celebrated the self, individualism, consciousness, and Neoplatonism, which stems from a Puritan tradition (Ruland 118). First published in 1841 in Essays, Emerson's "Self-Reliance" is a radical piece of literature which showcases his views about the individual in society. In this essay, Emerson expresses "a central doctrine: divinity [existing] intimately in each natural fact, [and] in each individual self" (Ruland 120).