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In Tupac’s song “Keep Ya Head Up” many lines are talking about Transcendentalism. This line is at the very beginning of the song and reflects on how the darker the berry the sweeter the juice. Tupac made a connection to nature and the plants as a way of describing the darker the skin the sweeter the person. He also talks about your roots going on with connecting with nature. He says the darker the flesh as in the more you do through the deeper your roots are.

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“I believe I can fly” by R. Kelly is an amazing example of Transcendentalism. He talks about how he feels like he can fly and touch the sky. Obviously he cannot, but it is a connection to nature and how in life he feel like he has no limits and can achieve a lot. This song was publicly very popular and thouse two lines are very well known lyrics that connect to Transcendentalism.

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I would have to say that this song has the most  transcendentalism meaning to it out of any song I have ever heard. This song is all about never stop believing in what you believe in. Emerson and Thoreau use to preach about being yourself and never letting anyone stop you from what you believe in.

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Don't Stop Believin' Lyrics: Just a small-town girl, livin' in a lonely world / She took the midnight train goin' anywhere / Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit / He took the midnight train goin

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This image shows the difference in people that support  transcendentalism and people who don’t. It’s showing that people that do believe it have a peaceful mindset and have a good relationship with nature and the outside world. But, for people that don’t believe in it their worlds aren’t as pretty and they don’t have the mind to see the world the way that others do.

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This article explained Transcendentalism to me even deeper than what I already know. Unlike others they touched into the works of art that Emerson published. They also talk about the struggle it took for people to understand what they were trying to teach to others about being one with nature, self reliance, & simplicity.

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Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass introduced the "free verse" style of poetry, reflecting the individualistic tone of transcendentalism. This picture of Whitman with a butterfly appeared in the 1889 edition.

Transcendentalism is a very formal word that describes a very simple idea. People, men and women equally, have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that "transcends" or goes beyond what they can see, hear, taste, touch or feel.

This knowledge comes through intuition and imagination not through logic or the senses. People can trust themselves to be their own authority on what is right. A transcendentalist is a person who accepts these ideas not as religious beliefs but as a way of understanding life relationships.

The individuals most closely associated with this new way of thinking were connected loosely through a group known as The Transcendental Club, which met in the Boston home of George Ripley. Their chief publication was a periodical called "The Dial," edited by Margaret Fuller, a political radical and feminist whose book "Women of the Nineteenth Century" was among the most famous of its time. The club had many extraordinary thinkers, but accorded the leadership position to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Margaret Fuller played a large part in both the women's and Transcendentalist movements. She helped plan the community at Brook Farm, as well as editing The Dial, and writing the feminist treatise, Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

Emerson was a Harvard-educated essayist and lecturer and is recognized as our first truly "American" thinker. In his most famous essay, "The American Scholar," he urged Americans to stop looking to Europe for inspiration and imitation and be themselves. He believed that people were naturally good and that everyone's potential was limitless. He inspired his colleagues to look into themselves, into nature, into art, and through work for answers to life's most perplexing questions. His intellectual contributions to the philosophy of transcendentalism inspired a uniquely American idealism and spirit of reform.

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again.
It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth.
It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts.
It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry.
It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought.
It can stand, and it can go.
It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires
Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

-Excerpt from The American Scholar, Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Transcendental Club was associated with colorful members between 1836 and 1860. Among these were literary figures Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman. But the most interesting character by far was Henry David Thoreau, who tried to put transcendentalism into practice. A great admirer of Emerson, Thoreau nevertheless was his own man - described variously as strange, gentle, fanatic, selfish, a dreamer, a stubborn individualist. For two years Thoreau carried out the most famous experiment in self-reliance when he went to Walden Pond, built a hut, and tried to live self-sufficiently without the trappings or interference of society. Later, when he wrote about the simplicity and unity of all things in nature, his faith in humanity, and his sturdy individualism, Thoreau reminded everyone that life is wasted pursuing wealth and following social customs. Nature can show that "all good things are wild and free."

Excerpt from "Walden"

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

"Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify."

- from Walden (1854), by Henry David Thoreau

As a group, the transcendentalists led the celebration of the American experiment as one of individualism and self-reliance. They took progressive stands on women's rights, abolition, reform, and education. They criticized government, organized religion, laws, social institutions, and creeping industrialization. They created an American "state of mind" in which imagination was better than reason, creativity was better than theory, and action was better than contemplation. And they had faith that all would be well because humans could transcend limits and reach astonishing heights.

Emerson's Writings
Many of Ralph Waldo Emerson's addresses, lectures, essays, and other writings are available on this website. You can search all the texts for words or phrases, and there's even a discussion forum for sharing questions and comments about the great American transcendentalist writer.

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I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing / a spear of summer grass. - Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, and Louisa May Alcott are all buried in the same cemetery.
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She wore this circle of friends, when I first knew her, as a necklace of diamonds about her neck. -Emerson on Margaret Fuller.
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Transcendentalism is a school of philosophical thought that developed in 19th century America. Important trancendentalist thinkers include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. The transcendentalists supported women's rights and the abolition of slavery, and were critical of organized religion and government.

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This podcast is really cool to actually listen to the people behind it talk about Transcendentalism. They really go into how the whole way of life started and how it is still very much used by people today. The also talk about how Walden was raised and how he got to his name today. They also go canoeing during the podcast to really have a connection to Transcendentalism.

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Walden & the Natural World of Transcendentalism

Henry David Thoreau, our specimen of American genius in nature, wrote famously short, and long. "Simplify," in a one-word sentence of good advice. But then 2- words on 7-thousand pages in his quotable lifetime journal.

It's one of many odd points to notice about Thoreau at his 200 th birthday: that the non-stop writer was equally a man of action, a scientist and a high-flying poet whose imagination saw that "the bluebird carries the sky on his back;" and still a workman with callused hands, at home in the wild, a walker four hours a day on average, in no particular direction. His transcendentalism was all about the blossoming intersection of nature-study introspection, fact idea, detail ideals. In his pine grove, on his river, at his pond, the Thoreau.

N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945) Walden Pond Revisited, 1942

What does a Transcendentalist do, we were asking in the first of three bicentennial Thoreau shows? All the answers are to be found in the canoe trip that became a masterpiece, titled: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. What the Transcendentalist does is soar - between water below and sky above; between this day and eternity, between Nature, and human society.

We start our journey at the South Bridge Boat House near Thoreau's house on Main Street in Concord, just upstream from the Concord River itself. A naturalist philosopher in the Thoreau lineage, Alex Strong from Maine, is one of our guides. During our trip down Thoreau's "little Nile", Alex tells us about what the strapping, young 22 year old was learning on his voyage:

He was learning about big-N Nature when he was studying the Perch, studying when flowers bloomed, where the bees were. The notes he took, the meticulous notes, weren't just about the little details; they're about understanding the whole picture and keeping nature sacred while understanding it, in all its finite mundane details.

Next up, the still-water Walden, a pond in Concord, Massachusetts where Henry Thoreau wrote his great book in a cabin by the shore. In 1845 Walden was a woodlot next to the new railway where the 28-year-old poet went to "suck out the marrow of life," whatever it turned out to be. Our guide to the pond and the book, the young philosopher John Kaag had been in and out of the Walden water the other morning before we got there.

Photo by Michael J. Lutch
While we're here, at Walden, we decided to stop and consider the statuesque, very tall, dark-green, almost black, pine trees all around Walden Pond, trees that Thoreau came to consider cousins, virtually human. Richard Higgins, widely traveled in Concord today, has written a book on Thoreau and the Language of Trees, and he has no doubt that Thoreau spoke it fluently, from the heart.

Finally, we conclude with a Thoreauvian meditation on walking. Real walkers are born, not made, Thoreau liked to say. "If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again, - if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk." These days the woods and the bookstores are full of such walkers. e literary traveler Andrew Forsthoefel made his reputation in public radio walking 4000 miles from Philadelphia to San Francisco, with a sign that said "walking to listen" and recording back-road stories. And then there's th Paul Theroux, of Cape Cod and Hawaii, of the Mosquito Coast and The Great Railway Bazaar. He has spent a lifetime on trains, and in kayaks, and a lot of it on his own two feet in China, in our own Deep South and specially in Africa. In our conversation, Theroux extends Thoreau's idea that walking is in-born, into some more than others.
See a full transcript of this show on

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Walden & the Natural World of Transcendentalism

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Henry David Thoreau, our specimen of American genius in nature, wrote famously short, and long. "Simplify," in a one-word sentence of good advice. But then 2- words on 7-thousand pages in his quotable lifetime journal.

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This quote by Thoreau really defines him. He was always someone who had a wide imagination. He connected with the world on a different level because of Transcendentalism. The world to Thoreau was like an empty canvas and he used his imagination to draw a beautiful picture for his life.

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The Origins of Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism has its origins in New England of the early 1800s and the birth of Unitarianism. It was born from a debate between "New Light" theologians, who believed that religion should focus on an emotional experience, and "Old Light" opponents, who valued reason in their religious approach.

These "Old Lights" became known first as "liberal Christians" and then as Unitarians, and were defined by the belief that there was no trinity of father, son and holy ghost as in traditional Christian belief, and that Jesus Christ was a mortal.

Various philosophies began to swirl around this crowd, and the ideas that would become Transcendentalism split from Unitarianism over its perceived rationality and instead embraced German Romanticism in a quest for a more spiritual experience.

Thinkers in the movement embraced ideas brought forth by philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ancient Indian scripture known as the Vedas and religious founder Emanuel Swedenborg.

Transcendentalists advocated the idea of a personal knowledge of God, believing that no intermediary was needed for spiritual insight. They embraced idealism, focusing on nature and opposing materialism.

By the 1830s, literature began to appear that bound the Transcendentalist ideas together in a cohesive way and marked the beginnings of a more organized movement.

The Transcendental Club

On September 12, 1836, four Harvard University alumni-writer and Bangor, Maine, minister Frederic Henry Hodge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Unitarian ministers George Ripley and George Putnam-left a celebration of the bicentennial of Harvard to meet at Willard's Hotel in Cambridge.

The purpose was to follow up on correspondence between Hodge and Emerson and to talk about the state of Unitarianism and what they could do about it.

One week later, the four met again at Ripley's house in Boston. This was a meeting of a much larger group that included many Unitarian ministers, intellectuals, writers and reformers. There would be 30 more meetings of what was called "the Transcendental Club" over the next four years, featuring a shifting membership that always included Emerson, Ripley, and Hodge.

The only rule the meetings followed was that no one would be allowed to attend if their presence prevented the group from discussing a topic. Emerson's essay "Nature," published in 1836, presented Transcendentalist philosophy as it had formed in the club meetings.

This group ceased to meet in 1840, but were involved in the publication The Dial, at first helmed by member and pioneering feminist Margaret Fuller, and later by Emerson, with the mission of addressing Transcendentalist thought and concerns.

Henry David Thoreau got his start in The Dial, reporting on wildlife in Massachusetts. After its demise in 1844, Thoreau moved to Walden Pond where he wrote his most famous work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods.

Brook Farm

Inspired by different utopian groups like the Shakers, members of the Transcendental Club were interested in forming a commune to put their ideas to the test. In 1841, a small group of them, including author Nathaniel Hawthorne, moved to a property named Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.

The venture, helmed by George Ripley, was covered in the pages of The Dial as an idyllic one that involved farm work by day and creative work by candlelight at night.

Emerson never joined the farm. He approved of the commune but didn't want to give up his privacy, preferring to be a frequent visitor. Thoreau refused to join as well, finding the entire idea unappealing. Margaret Fuller visited but felt the farm was destined for failure.

The farm was run by members buying shares for life-long membership, guaranteeing an annual return on their investment, and allowing members who could not afford a share to compensate with work. As farmers, they were fledglings, but Hawthorne, in particular, was thrilled by the physicality of farming life.

There was also a boarding school onsite that was the farm's primary income source. The farm proved successful enough that in its first year, members had to build new homes on the property to house everyone. There were over 100 residents.

In 1844, following a restructuring that brought further growth, the commune began to fall into a slow decline, with members becoming disillusioned by its mission, as well as financial challenges and other problems, and squabbling amongst themselves. By 1847, this particular Transcendentalist experiment was finished.

Transcendentalism Fades Out

As the 1850s arrived, Transcendentalism is considered to have lost some of its influence, particularly following the untimely death of Margaret Fuller in an 1850 shipwreck.

Though its members remained active in the public eye-notably Emerson, Thoreau and others in their public opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850-following the failure of Brook Farm, it never again materialized as a cohesive group.

Sources

American Transcendentalism. Philip F. Gura.
Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism. Chris Jennings.
Transcendentalism. Arizona State University.
Transcendentalism. Stanford University.

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Transcendentalism has its origins in New England of the early 1800s and the birth of Unitarianism. It was born from a debate between "New Light" theologians, who believed that religion should focus on an emotional experience, and "Old Light" opponents, who valued reason in their religious approach.

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This image is a very good example of Transcendentalism. It shows a man standing on top of a cliff looking down at the beautiful world. It represents the idea of being with nature and seeing the world in a different way that most people do.

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This poem was written out as a story but in a way to show  transcendentalism. It gave examples of ways that Emerson would live his  transcendentalism lifestyle. The way that she wrote the poem it was like Emerson was speaking straight to you.

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The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks

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This image really does describe Transcendentalism for me. It is a mixture of connecting with God, respecting yourself as a man or woman and connecting with nature on another level. I believe many people are fooled into thinking Transcendentalism is only having a deep connection to nature but that is not true there are many factors that go into living the “Transcendental” lifestyle.

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This image was taken of my friends and I fall break 2018 in Fripp Island. This trip will always stay with me because I felt so peaceful the whole week. The beach has always been somewhere that I feel like I can go to get some weight off of my shoulders and just enjoy the little things in life.

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Emerson has always been a huge believer in being self reliant. This quote from Emerson has a deeper meaning more than just being different than others. He talks about how you have to be ready to take chances, figure out life on your own, and be independent.

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This video is perfect example of a nutshell of what  Transcendentalism is. The man behind the video really goes through to explain the main people to start the belief and teachings of Transcendentalism, and how far it has come today. It also goes in to explain the misbelifs that Transcendentalism is only about nature when there is really so much more to it.

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This image is a picture of my best friend and I. We went to Sprayberry High School’s parking lot after a long day of school. It had been raining all day but it stopped when we got there and a beautiful rainbow appeared. The sight was so beautiful and I really connected with how peaceful the sky made me feel.

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As Emerson has always preached about self reliance this quote really shows a great example. Emerson was never afraid to do the things he wanted to do. Many people were against his way of thinking and way of life. That never stopped him from living his life through his beliefs. I have always lived by this quote as a good way to remember when I feel afraid to peruse something.

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This quote by Henry David Thoreau speaks a lot about Transcendentalism. You can do something for so long until you realize you are working at no results. You have to put yourself out there and experience new things in order to live and make goals that can be accomplished. This can apply to many things in your life work, sports, love life, family, goals.