Читать книгу A Journey Into the Transcendentalists' New England - R. Todd Felton - Страница 22

What Emerson and the Transcendentalists were trying to do for theology was in many ways a continuation of what poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had done for English poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, a collection of their poems. In the preface to the book (which was republished in 1800 and 1802 with extended and revised prefaces), Wordsworth defined the main tenets of the Romantic movement: an emphasis on individual experience and imagination along with a concurrent breaking away from traditional forms and imaginative conformity. Wordsworth also strove to use the language of the common man to illustrate his unique visions.

Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem The Prelude, Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and the shorter poems of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley are among the best-known works of the Romantics.

The Reverend William Ellery Channing attracted the attention and admiration of many of the Transcendentalists for his radical sermons, just as he attracted the ire of some of Harvard College’s more dogmatic leaders.