The Adaptation of Transcendentalism

The Adaptation of Transcendentalism None of the transcendentalist thinkers were very popular during their lives. Their ideas were all thought to be wild and barbaric when really they were just ahead of their time. Today, those same ideas that were thought to be too free and wild are actually seen as fairly tame and mild. Writers such as Walt Whitman, Ralph Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were all misunderstood by society during their lives. The typical lifestyle during the time of the early transcendentalists was very slow and the thinking was traditional; therefore, when Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson started sharing their ideas that went against the traditional way of life, they were seen as uncivilized and outspoken. Now, we can look back on the history of America and see how the people who fought the popular way of thinking or questioned why things were the way they were have caused seminal movements and changes in the way of life. Now that we recognize change as a good thing, we encourage others to be different and question society. We encourage people to stand up and fight popular thinking because those kinds of people are what have made America the way it is. But before they were seen as great minds, the early transcendentalists were considered wild and their ideas unthinkable. Ralph Emerson, for example, wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do” (“Self-Reliance” 47-49, Emerson). By this Emerson is saying that people who want to keep things the same just because that’s the way they have always been are wrong and ridiculous. Without questioning your way of life, great minds cannot rise and be great. At the time that he wrote this people did not feel the same way. Society pushed to keep everything unchanged because that’s the way it had always been done and it worked that way. Henry David Thoreau also wrote something along