In the 1830s and 1840s, some New Englanders, not quite happy about the materialistic-oriented life of their time, formed themselves into an informal club, the Transcendentalist Club, and met to discuss matters of interest to the life of the nation as a whole. They expressed their views, published their journal, the Dial, and made their voice heard. The club with a membership of some thirty men and a couple of women included Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller. Most of them were teachers or clergymen, radicals who reacted against the faith of Boston businessmen and the cold, rigid rationalism of Unitarianism. The word “Transcendental” was not native to America, it was a Kantian term denoting, as Emerson put it, “Whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought.”

The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. The Oversoul was an all-pervading power for goodness, omnipresent and omnipotent, from which all things came and of which all were a part. This represented a new way of looking at the world. It was a reaction against the direction that a mechanized, capitalist America was taking, against the popular tendency to get ahead in world affairs to neglect spiritual welfare. The Transcendentalist idea of individualism and self-absorption has been frequently criticized; the message of ones with nature and the first-person stream of consciousness style defined a new literary genre as well as a new philosophy and would later be echoed in the works of other writers of the era, such as Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman.