Although the transcendentalism movement was an extremely long time ago the ideas are still pertinent today. When Henry David Thoreau said, "Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree or an oak"(247), that he would be telling people to be themselves many generations later.
The transcendentalism movement took place during the early 1800's when
America was developing its own writing style. The authors of the time all thought in the same wavelength. Some of them, such as Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson belonged to a transcendentalism club in which they shared their ideas. Thoreau had ideas that he firmly believed in and tried to act upon his ideas. He wanted to live in solitude and be one with nature, so he went to Walden Pond and was semi-secluded from society. Except for a couple of times when he went to the nearby town for thi
told to do the right thing, however, today we use more our heads than our hearts to make decisions. As we read their writings we are inspired to change our lives, but most of us find it to hard to change. As a society we like to choose the easy way out, and in this case it is a lot easier to go along with the crowd than it is to stand out. We care so much about fitting in that we don't want to be different because we fear that nobody will like our true
These transcendentalists had many ideas that seemed to others to be extremely impractical. The authors thought that they could transform the world through their ideas. One of their main ideas was that we are all true individuals and should not conform to whatever the "norm" is. Thoreau tells us to live our own life, whether it be good or bad, it is ours. "However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it or call it hard names"(247). Also, we should do the morally ri
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