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Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement that was developing by the late 1820s and '30s in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality.
Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both people and nature. They believe that society and its institutions — particularly organized religion and political parties — ultimately corrupt the purity of the individual. They have faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. "Self-reliant" differs from the traditional usage of the word, however, and refers mainly to a fierce intellectual independence that believed itself capable of generating completely original insights with as little deference paid to past masters as possible.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A
leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings , and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled " The American Scholar" in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series , published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance , The Over-Soul , Circles , The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature , these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.
Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." Emerson is one of several figures who "took a more pantheist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world."
Walter " Walt " Whitman (1819 – 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass , which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.
Born in Huntington on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and — in addition to publishing his poetry — was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance
novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass , was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. When he died at age 72, his funeral became a public spectacle.
The Puritans were a group of English Protestants (Reformed Christians) in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to purify the Church of England from all Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England was only partially reformed. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some of the returning clergy exiled under Mary I shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England.
Historically, the word 'Puritan' was used pejoratively to characterize the Protestant group as extremists, similar to the Cathars of France and, according to Thomas Fuller in his Church History , dated back to 1564. Archbishop Matthew Parker of that time used it and 'precisian' with the sense of the modern 'stickler'. In modern times, the word 'puritan' is often used to mean 'against pleasure'.
Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892). Though the first edition was published in 1855, Whitman spent most of his professional life writing and re-writing Leaves of Grass, revising it multiple times until his death. This resulted in vastly different editions over four decades—the first a small book of twelve poems and the last a compilation of over 400 poems.
The poems of Leaves of Grass are loosely connected and each represents Whitman's celebration of his philosophy of life and humanity. This book is notable for its discussion of delight in sensual pleasures during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral. Where much previous poetry, especially English, relied on symbolism, allegory, and meditation on the religious and spiritual, Leaves of Grass (particularly the first edition) exalted the body and the material world. Influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement, itself an offshoot of Romanticism, Whitman's poetry praises nature and the individual human's role in it. However, much like Emerson, Whitman does not diminish the role of the mind or the spirit; rather, he elevates the human form and the human mind, deeming both worthy of poetic praise.
With one exception, the poems do not rhyme or follow standard rules for meter and line length. Among the poems in the collection are "Song of Myself", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking". Later editions included Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd".
- Metaphorical way of introducing nature to culture. Nature is part of us and we’re part of nature. Nature and culture are a perfect symbolic.
- Celebration of identity. Collectivity. He’s representing the content of America, its own culture.
- Anaphors, many repetitions, free form.
- Whitman is one of the contributors of modern poetry.
- Creating your own poem was a way to create your independence and construct your freedom.
- Sociology teaches that what we learn is what we see – biological, emotional and psychological form – teaches through school some sort of social love – religious idea – love is a creation
- Love is an idea/a way to fight against something meaningless
- Love becomes a life project, completing and making yourself perfect
- Belief in it – belief in humanity
- We got this ideal from God, religious meaning of identity
- Torment, adversity, harm, melody / + pleasant, wonder, good, unwary
- Contrast between two qualities in order to define and see something different from the rest – only important things can be seen as the union of something – it could include both, the good and the bad
- The Real Existence – love exists or is just a subjective approach?
- The more I drink, the more I get thirsty / something good that makes me feel bad, something bad that makes me feel good
- Orgasm – moment in-between from life to death
- Final message – oxymoronic – wonder malady full of things that makes us questioning ourselves. We can follow our impulses, battle of love in Middle Ages, instinct or react against it? – last metaphor
RELIGION
- Church – important 3rd^ element
- Religious experiences – God – Tradition – order – morality
- Existentialism – something beyond our natural physical experience
- Sense of life
- The unknown
- Need = support – God can be helping us
- Control
The Canterbury Tales (Middle English: Tales of Caunterbury) is a collection of over 20 stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century, during the time of the Hundred Years' War. The tales (mostly written in verse, although some are in prose) are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return.
After a long list of works written earlier in his career, including Troilus and Criseyde, House of Fame, and "Parliament of Fowls", The Canterbury Tales is near-unanimously seen as Chaucer's magnum opus. He uses the tales and the descriptions of its characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, and particularly of
the Church. Structurally, the collection resembles The Decameron , which Chaucer may have read during his first diplomatic mission to Italy in 1372.
It is sometimes argued that the greatest contribution The Canterbury Tales made to English literature was in popularizing the literary use of the vernacular, English, rather than French or Latin. English had, however, been used as a literary language centuries before Chaucer's time, and several of Chaucer's contemporaries—John Gower, William Langland, the Pearl Poet, and Julian of Norwich—also wrote major literary works in English. It is unclear to what extent Chaucer was responsible for starting a trend as opposed to simply being part of it.
While Chaucer clearly states the addressees of many of his poems, the intended audience of The Canterbury Tales is more difficult to determine. Chaucer was a courtier , leading some to believe that he was mainly a court poet who wrote exclusively for nobility.
- Canterbury – “secret place”
- Idea of Christianity in order to make religion the most important thing
- Idea of mirror – what the world was like and what English society was at the end of the XIV century
- Two tales on the way from London to Canterbury and vice versa
- Unfinished work
- Visual information
The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream is a Christian allegory written by John Bunyan (1628 – 1688) and published in February, 1678. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of religious English literature, has been translated into more than 200 languages, and has never been out of print. Bunyan began his work while in the Bedfordshire county prison for violations of the Conventicle Act, which prohibited the holding of religious services outside the auspices of the established Church of England. Early Bunyan scholars like John Brown believed The Pilgrim's Progress was begun in Bunyan's second, shorter imprisonment for six months in 1675, but more recent scholars like Roger Sharrock believe that it was begun during Bunyan's initial, more lengthy imprisonment from 1660–72 right after he had written his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.
The English text comprises 108,260 words and is divided into two parts, each reading as a continuous narrative with no chapter divisions. The first part was completed in 1677 and entered into the Stationers' Register on 22 December 1677. It was licensed and entered in the "Term Catalogue" on 18 February 1678, which is looked upon as the date of first publication. After the first edition of the first part in 1678, an expanded edition, with additions written after Bunyan was freed, appeared in 1679. The Second Part appeared in 1684. There were eleven editions of the first part in John Bunyan's lifetime, published in successive years from 1678 to 1685 and in 1688, and there were two editions of the second part, published in 1684 and 1686.
- Puritanism
- Idea of creating a new Church which is not that corrupted
- The Church of England starts in 1534 and will be divided – monarchists who protect the King and republicans who mainly represents puritanism
- English Civil War (1642 – 1649)
- Dark and bright elements
- The questions are to try to understand what is behind this process
- If God created the tiger as well, what is the idea of God from this creation
- Double emphasis – creation
- Lamb – symbolic opposite of tiger – purity, innocence, spiritual character
- Is it the same God who created both?
- Idea of responsibility and transgression
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession for the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald's magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.
Fitzgerald—inspired by the parties he had attended while visiting Long Island's north shore—began planning the novel in 1923, desiring to produce, in his words, "something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." Progress was slow, with Fitzgerald completing his first draft following a move to the French Riviera in 1924. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, felt the book was too vague and convinced the author to revise over the next winter. Fitzgerald was repeatedly ambivalent about the book's title and he considered a variety of alternatives, including titles that referenced the Roman character Trimalchio; the title he was last documented to have desired was Under the Red, White, and Blue.
First published by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received mixed reviews and sold poorly; in its first year, the book sold only 20,000 copies. Fitzgerald died in 1940, believing himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. However, the novel experienced a revival during World War II, and became a part of American high school curricula and numerous stage and film adaptations in the following decades. Today, The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary classic and a contender for the title " Great American Novel". In 1998, the Modern Library editorial board voted it the 20th century's best American novel and second best English-language novel of the same time period.
- Idealism = realism
- Anthology – tries to understand how we know
- Epistemology – tries to understand the things in themselves
- Subdivisions
- Complex background
- Social background
- A love story will be an excuse to talk about something else
- West egg – Ashes – East egg
- Ashes – eyes of God
- NYC – city of sin, punished by God
- Money – New and Old
- Possibility of working people to get money
- Practical objects that would be Art – benefits through their works
- American dream
- Disgusting social statements
- Daisy – Old money – diva, incredible, arrogant, they strangely fall in love
- James Gates falls in love with Daisy
- Narrator very realistic
- Gatsby was born very poor – He came to know a very rich man – Gatsby gets to know the world with him
- He was taught the manners of a gentleman
- The weather matches with the emotions
Ash Wednesday (sometimes Ash-Wednesday) is the first long poem written by T. S. Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, this poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.
Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", Ash-Wednesday, with a base of Dante's Purgatorio , is richly but ambiguously allusive and deals with the move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. The style is different from his poetry which predates his conversion. "Ash-Wednesday" and the poems that followed had a more casual, melodic, and contemplative method.
Many critics were "particularly enthusiastic concerning 'Ash-Wednesday'", while in other quarters it was not well received. Among many of the more secular literati its groundwork of orthodox Christianity was discomfiting. Edwin Muir maintained that "'Ash-Wednesday' is one of the most moving poems he [Eliot] has written, and perhaps the most perfect."
- Literary reference to Virgin Mary
- “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death”
