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Table of Contents
Foreword, by Jeffrey S. Cramer
1. Transcendentalism: An Introduction
7. Utopian Societies: Transcendent Communities
To my Grandparents Felton, whose love of knowledge has inspired a lifetime of learning
Foreword
A book of travel can unseat the most armchair-bound reader. “A traveler. I love his title,” Thoreau wrote. “Going from—toward—; it is the history of every one of us.” For a Transcendentalist, a journey was not just an opportunity to place a label on one’s trunk. It was a progression, not merely from one place to another, but from one experience to another. “The question is not where did the traveler go, what places did he see?” Thoreau asked, “...but who was the traveler? how did he travel? how genuine an experience did he get?”
A Journey into the Transcendentalists’ New England gives us an introduction to the landscapes and locations connected with the some of the greatest of American writers, when the American renaissance gave voice to a literature that was unmistakably our own, a literature that could have been written only in America. To travel in Concord, in Salem, in Boston and Cambridge, in Amherst, is to visit with Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott, Dickinson, and Frost, and to know them as living, breathing human beings, whose ideas and writings resonate today in significant and vital ways.
Unlike the guide in Frost’s “Directive” who “only has at heart your getting lost,” R. Todd Felton has at the heart of his book our finding ourselves. Perhaps that is why he chooses to make Concord and Walden the two central chapters of this book. No other places are more closely identified with the Transcendental world than that town and that pond.
This book leads us through the Transcendental landscape, both the literal land and the land as found in the literature, but it is much more than a roadmap to famous sites. It is a roadmap to the thoughts that established what were called “new views” but which Emerson reminded us were not new at all but just “idealism as it appears in 1842.” Certainly, a book that introduces contemporary readers to a sense of idealism cannot be unwelcome in a time when so many seem to have lost their way.
Whether we visit one or all the places in this book, or simply enjoy reading about them as an armchair traveler, there is—to borrow from one of our New England poets—no frigate like a book, there is no frigate like this book, to take us lands away.
JEFFREY S. CRAMER
Curator of Collections
The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods
Preface and Acknowledgments
Some of us can remember the first time we came into contact with the Transcendentalists. For me, Thoreau’s Walden was one of the hurdles that stood between me and high school graduation. I’d like to say reading Thoreau in my senior English course changed my life, but it didn’t. For years, all I remembered was a passage about the warring ants, because our house, like many houses in California, was occasionally infested by ants, and I thought the idea of them fighting each other was cool.
However, after years of teaching writing and running a writing center, I began to be interested in how groups of writers fed off each other’s ideas and energies. In my literature courses, my students explored various groups of writers and how they interacted with each other—the Beat poets, the British Romantics, the members of the Irish literary revival—so when I saw an opportunity to delve into another group of artists and thinkers, I jumped at the chance.
My initial emphasis in researching this book was on the connections among the Transcendentalists—the ways they spurred each other on through one-on-one conversations and group discussions. However, as I quickly came to appreciate, Transcendentalism is first and foremost about forging one’s own relationship with the universe, whether that is a spiritual, philosophic, aesthetic, moral, or practical bond. This individuality makes it hard to convey a unified vision of Transcendentalism, or even of its practitioners.
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