What does /lit/ think of transcendentalism? I'm reading

>>8764556
Trees are like, really pretty and thinking is like, really hard and it's the 1800s and having gay sex on some moss is like the most sublime thing imaginable

>>8764564
Is that all there is to it? I'm not just dumb?

I haven't came across anything incredibly profound in Whitman. He has common thoughts and ideas and expresses them in what many consider to be a lovely way.

In short, it's poetry before philosophy.

>>8764556
>anti-whitman circle jerk begins
delet this

I have no idea what the fuck Whitman is talking about in the first place

>I jizz over all the grass, trees, lakes and mountains
>and over Manhattan and the Atlantic ocean which lovingly recieves my jizz
>and over all the men and woman in my life that I love
>and over slaves and rich men (I do not discriminate),
>but it is not me who jizzes over them, but my soul.

>repeat for 300 pages and create the best American poety ever

File: 1429471854562.jpg (94KB, 475x321px) Image search: [Google]

94KB, 475x321px

>>8764729
>make a post about literature on /lit/
>circle jerking
Neck yourself faggot

>>8764556
They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson's words, “an original relation to the universe” (O, 3).

What's wrong with this? Seems like exactly what we need at least politically and ecologically. In term economically. Hell even philosophically psychologically.

>>8764556
Whitman wasn't a Transcendentalist, though Emerson was obviously an influence.

The Transcendentalists were a group of writers and poets living in and around Concord, Mass during the 1830's and 1840's -- Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and number of other lesser lights. They were inspired mainly by German idealism via Coleridge and Carlyle. Emerson went on to repudiate the term Transcendentalism.

If you want to actually understand Emerson, you really need to all his essays and not just Self Reliance. It's not just about nature and shiet.

>>8764863
What other essays would you recommend?

>>8764940
Experience and Circles are good starting points.

>>8764863
So then what was Whitman?

>I'm gonna have to call in an expert
>it's not a picture of Socrates

>>8765020
Whitman is hard to classify. He's just not a Transcendentalist. Emerson actually told Whitman to tone it down. Specifically the Children of Adam series which includes a poem that links jizz and American democracy.

The Transcendentalists were mostly Harvard educated and many had even toured Europe. Whitman was a working class kid from Long Island.

>>8765042
I'm Socrates, and this is my acropolis. I work here with my old man and my son, Plato. Everything in Athens has a form and a price. One thing I've learned in 71 years- you never know WHAT'S gonna come through that agora.

>>8764556
They're just hippies for the 19th century.

I was a big fan of this book - American Adam (just search for Whitman).


https://www.archive.org/stream/americanadam030355mbp/americanadam030355mbp_djvu.txt

Whitman's narrator is like Adam - alone in nature, naming things, encountering them for the first time. I always the natural environment of the US (with the rapidly expanding frontier at this time) represented a chance for human beings to start over completely and feel firsthand what it's like to be the first person.

Whitman always goes well with Walden and Emerson - try reading The American Scholar which is short and see how those themes apply to Whitman.

The anon who said the book was just him gay jizzing all over everything - yeah, that's also true.

>>8765020
Exuberant realism.

I think the point is to realize that nature's underlying mechanisms we don't yet understand have a great influence on where we'll end up.

It's almost like a cult following along with most other ideologies. Accepting a omnipresent divinity instead of digging deeper into what's in front of us.

Sure the result may be madness, but it also might be enlightenment. That's for you to decide.