First, the search for truth in Transcendentalism begins with. Secondly, their essays are both inspired from transcendentalism movement. While comparing these two essays, it is. If it has not become apparent thus far Emerson and Thoreau were close friends and lived with each other on occasion. His is the main difference between the two writers however in their belief and writing patterns Thoreau loved nature. The philosophical theory contained such aspects as self-examination, the celebration of individualism, and the belief that the fundamental truths existed outside of human experience.
Fulfillment of this search for knowledge came when one gained an acute awareness of beauty and truth, and communicated with nature to find union with the Over-Soul. When this occurred, one was cleansed of materialistic.
Living with Emerson gave Thoreau insight and inspiration on how to write, and eventually led him to write Walden Henry David Thoreau, Discovering Biography. Walden was also inspired by Transcendentalism, a literary movement that challenged the use and. They see them as Eternal Soul, part and parcel of God, the absolute truth. Kawohl, Kurt. Anti-Transcendentalism was an opposition movement to the Transcendentalist.
The Transcendentalist were writers who supported the beauty of Nature, the kindness of Humans and a distrust in government. Dickinson never tied herself to a specific school of thought or philosophy, she was simply herself. Perhaps that was transcendental. Some poems of Emily Dickinson seem to be transcendental, yet not quite. Henry spent his time at the house writing, reading, taking long walks, observing nature and entertaining visitors.
While living at Walden Pond he worked extensively, writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a book about a trip he had taken with his brother John who died three years later of lockjaw. Explanation: Henry David Thoreau moved to the woods of Walden Pond and built a cabin there to conduct an experiment about living in solitude. He wanted to to learn to live deliberately.
By living in solitude he understood that a simple life can be a meaningful life. Transcendentalists were idealistic and optimistic because they believed they could find answers to whatever they were seeking. They will participate in a group presentation and a Socratic Seminar. Finally, they will complete an essay as the culminating activity for the entire Transcendentalism unit.
Students at Burlington High School spend their junior year focusing on the theme of identity. The Transcendentalism unit focuses on finding identity in Nature and society. With the help of works from Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, students learn to understand their connection with nature, as well as with society.
It is a 3 week unit which includes readings from Thoreau and Emerson, viewing the film Into the Wild, and culminating in an argumentative essay which focuses on Into the Wild and Transcendental ideas. This unit will introduce students to Transcendentalism and the works of Henry David Thoreau. The unit will be prefaced by a PowerPoint presentation of my trip to Walden Pond and a brief lecture on my experience.
The unit is designed to expose 11th grade students to Thoreau and Transcendentalism. These lessons would be an addition to the lesson plans already in place for Thoreau and Emerson, including the reading of Civil Disobedience and Nature.
These lessons push students more toward critiquing, formulating big ideas, and more evaluative writing whereas previous lessons stressed more reading and comprehension of text. In this unit we will attempt to seek out the transcendentalist in ourselves.
We will be examining works of the great transcendentalist writers specifically Thoreau and Emerson and comparing and contrasting the paths they took. We will look at how some people of the 19th century sought a different method of dealing with idealism and naturalism by becoming self-sufficient and removing themselves to a utopian existence. History, Grade Many students of American history are confused by the mid-nineteenth century period, finding it difficult to understand or relate to what life was like during those decades.
To many it is a nebulous uncertain period between major historical conflicts. Sandwiched between the Revolutionary War, War of , and the impending Civil War, little seemed to happen of significance other than a growth in territory and avoidance of disunion.
Change appeared to be happening under the surface, but it did not have the obvious and enormous social and political upheaval of the Civil War and later Gilded Age. However, this period marked a blossoming of American art, thought and philosophy, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the Transcendentalist period from the s to s.
The objective of this unit is to allow students to understand the major philosophical Transcendentalist thinking at the time, and to relate it to themselves and their experience locally.
More than the details of his situation at the pond, he relates the spiritual exhilaration of his going there, an experience surpassing the limitations of place and time. He writes of the morning hours as a daily opportunity to reaffirm his life in nature, a time of heightened awareness.
To be awake — to be intellectually and spiritually alert — is to be alive. He states his purpose in going to Walden: to live deliberately, to confront the essentials, and to extract the meaning of life as it is, good or bad. He exhorts his readers to simplify, and points out our reluctance to alter the course of our lives. He again disputes the value of modern improvements, the railroad in particular. Our proper business is to seek the reality — the absolute — beyond what we think we know.
This higher truth may be sought in the here and now — in the world we inhabit. Our existence forms a part of time, which flows into eternity, and affords access to the universal. In the chapter "Reading," Thoreau discusses literature and books — a valuable inheritance from the past, useful to the individual in his quest for higher understanding. True works of literature convey significant, universal meaning to all generations. Such classics must be read as deliberately as they were written.
He complains of current taste, and of the prevailing inability to read in a "high sense. Good books help us to throw off narrowness and ignorance, and serve as powerful catalysts to provoke change within.
In "Sounds," Thoreau turns from books to reality. He advises alertness to all that can be observed, coupled with an Oriental contemplation that allows assimilation of experience.
As he describes what he hears and sees of nature through his window, his reverie is interrupted by the noise of the passing train. At first, he responds to the train — symbol of nineteenth century commerce and progress — with admiration for its almost mythical power. He then focuses on its inexorability and on the fact that as some things thrive, so others decline — the trees around the pond, for instance, which are cut and transported by train, or animals carried in the railroad cars.
His comments on the railroad end on a note of disgust and dismissal, and he returns to his solitude and the sounds of the woods and the nearby community — church bells on Sundays, echoes, the call of the whippoorwill, the scream of the screech owl indicative of the dark side of nature and the cry of the hoot owl.
The noise of the owls suggests a "vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. He builds on his earlier image of himself as a crowing rooster through playful discussion of an imagined wild rooster in the woods, and closes the chapter with reference to the lack of domestic sounds at his Walden home. Nature, not the incidental noise of living, fills his senses. Thoreau opens "Solitude" with a lyrical expression of his pleasure in and sympathy with nature. When he returns to his house after walking in the evening, he finds that visitors have stopped by, which prompts him to comment both on his literal distance from others while at the pond and on the figurative space between men.
There is intimacy in his connection with nature, which provides sufficient companionship and precludes the possibility of loneliness. The vastness of the universe puts the space between men in perspective. Thoreau points out that if we attain a greater closeness to nature and the divine, we will not require physical proximity to others in the "depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house" — places that offer the kind of company that distracts and dissipates.
He comments on man's dual nature as a physical entity and as an intellectual spectator within his own body, which separates a person from himself and adds further perspective to his distance from others. Moreover, a man is always alone when thinking and working. He concludes the chapter by referring to metaphorical visitors who represent God and nature, to his own oneness with nature, and to the health and vitality that nature imparts.
Thoreau asserts in "Visitors" that he is no hermit and that he enjoys the society of worthwhile people as much as any man does. He comments on the difficulty of maintaining sufficient space between himself and others to discuss significant subjects, and suggests that meaningful intimacy — intellectual communion — allows and requires silence the opportunity to ponder and absorb what has been said and distance a suspension of interest in temporal and trivial personal matters.
True companionship has nothing to do with the trappings of conventional hospitality. He writes at length of one of his favorite visitors, a French Canadian woodchopper, a simple, natural, direct man, skillful, quiet, solitary, humble, and contented, possessed of a well-developed animal nature but a spiritual nature only rudimentary, at best.
As much as Thoreau appreciates the woodchopper's character and perceives that he has some ability to think for himself, he recognizes that the man accepts the human situation as it is and has no desire to improve himself. Thoreau mentions other visitors — half-wits, runaway slaves, and those who do not recognize when they have worn out their welcome. Visiting girls, boys, and young women seem able to respond to nature, whereas men of business, farmers, and others cannot leave their preoccupations behind.
Reformers — "the greatest bores of all" — are most unwelcome guests, but Thoreau enjoys the company of children, railroad men taking a holiday, fishermen, poets, philosophers — all of whom can leave the village temporarily behind and immerse themselves in the woods.
His bean-field offers reality in the forms of physical labor and closeness to nature. He writes of turning up Indian arrowheads as he hoes and plants, suggesting that his use of the land is only one phase in the history of man's relation to the natural world.
His bean-field is real enough, but it also metaphorically represents the field of inner self that must be carefully tended to produce a crop. Thoreau comments on the position of his bean-field between the wild and the cultivated — a position not unlike that which he himself occupies at the pond. He recalls the sights and sounds encountered while hoeing, focusing on the noise of town celebrations and military training, and cannot resist satirically underscoring the vainglory of the participants.
He notes that he tends his beans while his contemporaries study art in Boston and Rome, or engage in contemplation and trade in faraway places, but in no way suggests that his efforts are inferior. Thoreau has no interest in beans per se, but rather in their symbolic meaning, which he as a writer will later be able to draw upon.
He vows that in the future he will not sow beans but rather the seeds of "sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like. Lamenting a decline in farming from ancient times, he points out that agriculture is now a commercial enterprise, that the farmer has lost his integral relationship with nature.
The true husbandman will cease to worry about the size of the crop and the gain to be had from it and will pay attention only to the work that is particularly his in making the land fruitful. Thoreau begins "The Village" by remarking that he visits town every day or two to catch up on the news and to observe the villagers in their habitat as he does birds and squirrels in nature. But the town, full of idle curiosity and materialism, threatens independence and simplicity of life.
He resists the shops on Concord's Mill Dam and makes his escape from the beckoning houses, and returns to the woods. He writes of going back to Walden at night and discusses the value of occasionally becoming lost in the dark or in a snowstorm.
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