torna alla schermata "U.S.A."T r a s c e n d e n t a l i s m
The spirit of Romanticism (early 19th century) sweeping over Europe has many manifestations in America: adventure stories (J. Fenimore Cooper), gothic influenced tales (E.A. Poe), or a more "democratic" poetry (W. Whitman). The highest spokesman of Trascendentalism is Ralph Waldo Emerson, Trascendentalism is "a flash of lightning faith", which is now illumining literature, philosophy and religion. The movement has a short life, but it will influence literature and, above all, ideas for long and its consequences will cross the whole 19th century and even beyond. Trascendentalism was born in Concord – Massachusetts – H. D. Thoreau’s birthplace. The movement also sees the participation of women.
The word "Trascendentalism" is attribuited to the German philosopher E. Kant. Both Kant and W. Wordsworth deeply influenced the development of Trascendentalism. Kant himself spoke of the "native spontaneity of the human mind" and the principle of man’s "innate" potential crumbles the empiricism of J. Locke based on the mind as a tabula rasa and consequently knowledge derives from sensations. On the other hand, the Trascendentalists affirm the value of intuitive truth independent from senses. They also stress that knowledge is available to any man within himself. Wordsworth’s preoccupation with spiritual growth, the concept of Nature as a mirror of the soul and his "literature of the poor" (see the "rustic forefathers" of Lines written in a Country Churchyard ) influenced Emerson and Thoreau. Also S.T. Coleridge’s idea of primary imagination as "the living power and prime agent of all human perception" (see Biographia Literaria ) will largely influence the American Trascendentalists.
The individualistic imprint of European Romanticism ("individualistic" as in search for an inner, deeper truth and a special stress of individual consciousness) appeals to growing numbers of educated Americans, many of whom went to Europe to experience the revolution in ideas.
In 1831 Emerson laments in his The American Scholar (a work which became known as "America’s declaration of literary independence") that "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe". Fifteen years later, in The Poet, Emerson will write:
Our long-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boats and our repudiation, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes, its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
More than anybody, Walt Whitman will answer to Emerson’s call.