1 - Transcendentalism and Its Times

Summary

“The ancient manners were giving way,” Emerson recalled in 1867, looking back some three decades to the beginning of the Transcendentalist movement. As he tried to explain the milieu in which his early work emerged with such impact, he concluded that “the key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new consciousness” (W 10: 325-26). Emerson wanted to explain the movement's sense of newness, of what many felt to be the initiation of a new era in human history. But now at some distance himself from these earlier hopes, he placed the fervor of this movement in a larger framework of the cycles of human history, part of the necessary and inevitable process of reform and renewal. Transcendentalism represented one of the recurrent periods in which “the party of the Past” and “the party of the Future” collide. “At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State and social customs” (W 10: 325). Transcendentalism was thus a moment in history containing both expansive hope and a sense of strife and embattlement, and marked by the emergence of new intellectual categories, new relations among persons and classes, and new ethical and political imperatives.'