Transcendentalism / The New England Renaissance

Transcendentalism an idealist philosophical tendency among writers in and around Boston in the mid 19th century. Growing out of Christian Unitarianism in the 1830s under the influence of German and British romanticism. Transcendentalism affirmed Kant principle of intuitive knowledge not derived from the senses, while rejecting organized religion for an extremely individualistic celebration of the divinity in each human being. The transcendentalists' manner of interpreting nature in symbolic terms had a profound influence on American literature of this period, notably in the works of Natha…