Bronson And Ralph Waldo Emerson

In 1835 Emerson settled in Concord, Massachusetts, where he started friendship with other literary figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), and Margaret Fuller (1810–1850). They met occasionally and informally to discuss religion, philosophy, and literature. Those meetings led to the emergence of the movement known as Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists prized poetry as the loftiest form of artistic expression and advised poetic innovation, not blind imitation of poetic conventions (Buell 97). The core of Emerson’s beliefs, and of the movement’s creed can be found in a half dozen pieces: “The American Scholar” (1837), “Divinity School Address,” (1838) “Self-Reliance,” (1841)