What tone do the transcendentalist essays feature?

SEMINAR 5 – 6

Task 1. Answer the questions: (no more than 20 – 30 words for each answer, your answers should be short and clear)

1. 
   What do Transcendentalists believe about the “Divine Soul” which they call also by the name of the Eternal One”?
   

Basic Beliefs to Transcendentalism Everything in the world, including people, is a reflection of God, or the Divine Soul. The physical world is a doorway to the spiritual world. People can use intuition to see God in nature and in their own soul.

2. 
   What tone do the transcendentalist essays feature?
   

In essays like Emerson’s “Nature” or “Self-Reliance, ”Transcendentalist writers sought to convince their audiences of their perspective of stuff. The essay form fit this aim because essays could be published in periodicals or delivered as lectures, a double-whammy that helped in reaching wide audiences.

3. 
   According to “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”, why does Thoreau move to Walden pond?
   

Where should his house be located? Thoreau considers. He has talked to all the nearby farmers and imagined buying their houses and living there. He believes a place in the country to be best, far from the village. In his imagination, he lays out the plans to many houses and then decides against building them, because he says true richness is leaving things alone.

4. 
   Why does he eventually depart from it?
   

In the conclusion of Walden he writes, “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”

5. 
   Why doesn’t Thoreau feel lonely, even when it seems he is physically isolated from other human beings?
   

In the extract Solitude, Thoreau is sharing his experience and arguing that to be alone doesn’t mean to be lonely, and that loneliness is an abstract notion. He lived in a cabin in the woods, he lived fully and deliberately as possible for the sake of understanding the meaning of life. He is part of the Milky Way. He is surrounded by countless living creatures

6. 
   What are some of the other “I’s” that characterize American Romanticism?
   

The five I’s of romanticism are imagination, intuition, individuality, idealism, and inspiration.