The mind's the limit

American Transcendentalism

A History

Philip F. Gura

Hill & Wang: 366 pp., $27.50

The Tao of Emerson The Wisdom of the Tao Te Ching as Found in the Words of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Edited by Richard Grossman Modern Library: 180 pp., $24.95

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Almost anyone who muddled their way through high school has heard of the Transcendentalists. Plenty of people could even name some of them: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau or even, perhaps, Walt Whitman. Some of us might even own a dog-eared paperback of "Walden." But only a few of us could tell you what Transcendentalism actually means.

We shouldn't feel too bad about this, it turns out, for even in its heyday, from the 1830s through the 1850s, the average American was equally befuddled by the term. "When a speaker talked so that his audience didn't understand him, and when he said what he didn't understand himself -- that was transcendentalism," as one newspaper reporter joked in 1853.

Philip Gura, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sets out to change all that. He has succeeded grandly. In "American Transcendentalism: A History," Gura untangles this complex web of ideas and characters and weaves them into a clear, coherent and compelling tale of America's first, and maybe greatest, major intellectual movement.

Perhaps the easiest way into this story for us 21st century dwellers is to compare it to a more familiar period of countercultural revolt: the 1960s (technically, the late 1950s through the early 1970s). The similarities are not coincidental. Thousands of disaffected baby boomers found inspiration and vindication in Margaret Fuller's feminism, Emerson's mystical essay "The Over-Soul" and Thoreau's early environmentalism.

Like in the 1960s, a delicious sense of "Newness," as one contemporary called it, pervaded the 1830s. The average age of the population was 16 in 1830, the result of a baby boom following the War of 1812, and the number of colleges in the United States had more than quintupled, from nine to nearly 50. The Industrial Revolution was making life more comfortable but also more materialistic and market-driven. New ideas were drifting in from Europe, where scientists were demystifying the natural world in fields as diverse as physics and physiology, historians and linguists were upending the notion that the Bible came directly from God's mouth, and the Romantic philosophers and poets were exploring the power and possibilities of human consciousness. Nowhere was this more true than in Boston, the proud "Athens of America."