Transcendentalist Poems?

Question

Will someone please give me some ideas for poems to write that have transcendentalist themes ideas?

Answer 1

Ideas for poems, especially poems of the transcendental experience, have to be drawn from your own experience. Your experience may be a glorious mystic vision, defining your life and illuminating the universe around you. For most of us, regrettably, it is not so profound. For most of us it is a moment of insight, perhaps when we are walking along a favorite path in the woods, listing to a passage of music that “sends” us, remembering an experience of childhood or a long lost friendship, looking into the eyes or touching the smooth skin of one we love—in other words, the moment of insight may be a time when one is in harmony with the universe, when all is one and all is well.

One way to begin to recognize such moments is to notice where, when, and how other poets have found them. See the site below, for example. [1]

For one of my favorite transcendental poets it could be while revisiting a beautiful spot in nature or climbing a mountain, being lost in mist or fog:

William Wordsworth
from Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

from the Prelude, Book 6

Imagination--here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say--
"I recognise thy glory:" in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
Under such banners militant, the soul
Seeks for no trophies, struggles for no spoils
That may attest her prowess, blest in thoughts
That are their own perfection and reward,
Strong in herself and in beatitude
That hides her, like the mighty flood of Nile
Poured from his fount of Abyssinian clouds
To fertilise the whole Egyptian plain.

Yes, you see, "our being's heart and home, / Is with infinitude." Only when we experience a glimpse into infinitude, do we find the momentum for transcendental poetry.

Answer 2

I would have to second Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wrote Self Reliance which was basically about being independent. Also I would recommend Henry David Thoreau, he wrote Civil Disobedience, which was mainly about the lack of need for a government.

Answer 3

A good source would be the poems and sermons of Emerson. He was the most prolific writer of the period. Thoreau's dissertation on civil disobedience would be another good source.

Answer 4

The Pretensions of Poverty by T. Carew is found in Walden by Henry David Thoreau. You can probably use that.