Research Project
Transcendentalism :
Utopian Movement :
Brook Farm Community :
Nathaniel Hawthorne :
Brook farm : Nathaniel Hawthorne founded Brook Farm, Though he was not a strong adherent of the community's ideals.
Ralph Waldo Emerson :
Brook Farm : Taking root in America, Transcendentalism created a cultural renaissance in New England during 1830-45 and received its chief American expression in Ralph Waldo Emerson's individualistic doctrine of self-reliance.
Edgar Allen Poe :
Wrote a story, "Never bet the devil your head" (1841), in which he embedded elements of deep dislike for transcendentalism, calling its followers "Frogpondians" after the pond on Boston Common The narrator ridiculed their writings by calling them "metaphor-run" lapsing into "mysticism for mysticism's sake", and called it a "disease." The story specifically mentions the movement and its flagship journal The Dial, though Poe denied that he had any specific targets. In Poe's essay "The philosophy of composition" (1846), he offers criticism denouncing "the excess of the suggested meaning... which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists."