EMERSON AND THOREAU – TWO GREAT MEN THINKING
EMERSON AND THOREAU – TWO GREAT MEN THINKING

Summary/Abstract: With the decay of English romanticism and the gradual departure from it, the literature of the United States began to achieve its independence from that of the mother country. Although the ties of that relationship remained close, new intellectual influences from Scotland and Germany, for instance, began to counterbalance those from England. American writers began to show an increasing awareness of foreign literature as well as of foreign languages. What is even more important, the population of the country, in the form of periodical readers and lecture audiences, gradually became capable of supporting native authors who adopted knowledge and points of view that were a part of a native tradition. Ideas from abroad were not merely re-expressed in America but were absorbed and often given a new shade, a new interpretation. The literary stuff of other lands was adapted rather than adopted for American needs. The United States became a melting pot of ideas as well as of peoples. In this sense the most striking development in American literature was the emergence of a group of individualistic writers who either belonged to what is called the Transcendental movement or possessed a point of view closely related to that of the Transcendentalists. And it was exactly the most outstanding among them, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who loudly announced the appearance of America’s great poets. When they arrive, Emerson predicted, they would come with an American thought, an American experience, breaking away from European forms and seeking American ways and techniques.

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