Visibility beyond the Visible [antikvár]

Preface American Transcendentalism did not introduce a coherent system of aesthetic or theological thought. Neither did it embrace ideas of "pure art". By bridging wide-ranging intellectualism and an exaltedly poetic worldview, the aesthetic-religious group of the American Transcen-dentalists, so influential in shaping young America's cultural identity, retains a unique place in the spiritual and literary history of the United States. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the group constituted the intellectual elite of New England and set the literary and conceptual parameters which for decades remained the indispensable framework of reference for writers as diverse as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The combination of profound religious faith with artistic sensibility, of theological enlightenment with verbal perfectionism, of philosophical awareness with aesthetic daring constitutes the very essence of American Transcendentalism. Ignoring some of these components or isolating them unnecessarily has led some researchers to unjust or even unfounded criticisms: the Transcendentalists have been accused of philosophical and theological incoherence, of eclecticism and lack of originality at the expense of literary accomplishment, of conceptual weightiness which rendered their art "impure", etc. Such criticisms, however, spanning the gamut of critical biases with a propensity for discovering contradictions, can neither explain, nor invalidate the image of wholeness and perfection which the written oeuvre of the Transcendentalists emanates. And the impression this image has left is undeniable: American Transcendentalism exerted immense power over generations of poets, writers and readers. It seems, therefore, best to examine the American Transcendentalists not as adherents to an intellectual or aesthetic movement, but through the personified categories they themselves invented, namely, the universalized figures of the "poet", the "thinker" and the "prophet". Only then can the spiritual and poetic scope of their work be clearly perceived, so that even the apparent nonsystematic nature of