British Romantic authors William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle greatly influenced the New England Transcendentalists. Poets Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Coleridge (1772–1834) together wrote Lyrical Ballads, the first edition of which was issued in 1798. In these poems, Wordsworth and Coleridge presented personal feeling, employed language that reflected the spoken rather than the stylized written word, and focused on both the supernatural and ordinary experience. In his Biographia Literaria (1817) and his Aids to Reflection (1825), Coleridge presented the Kantian distinction between knowledge gained through the senses ("Understanding") and that grasped intuitively ("Reason") and discussed German philosophy. Carlyle (1795–1881) impressed the Transcendentalists with his essays on German literature and philosophy, his translations from Goethe, his Sartor Resartus (1836), The French Revolution (1837), and On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841). Some of the Transcendentalists had the opportunity to meet Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle. Emerson met all three of them on his first trip abroad (1832–1833). The Transcendentalists also read German and French Romantic authors, among them Goethe, Richter, Schlegel, Cousin, Chateaubriand, and Madame de Stäel.
American Romanticismwas powerfully expressed with the anonymous publication of Emerson's Nature in 1836. This manifesto of Transcendentalism, based on earlier journal entries, sermons, and lectures, was soon followed by the important addresses "The American Scholar" (1837) and the "Divinity School Address" (1838). In "The American Scholar," delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard on August 31, 1837, and published in the same year, Emerson urged self-reliance, self-knowledge, and closeness to nature in the forging of an original American thought and literature. In the "Divinity School Address," delivered at Harvard on July 15, 1838, and first printed in the same year, he exhorted the pursuit of spiritual truth by the individual through intuition rather than through the passive acceptance of traditional religion. The publication of these three "scriptures" of Transcendentalism imparted energy and momentum to the efforts of the movement's proponents. The Transcendental Club was formed in 1836, the year in which Nature was published, providing the opportunity for Emerson, Alcott, Clarke, Parker, Fuller, Ripley, Brownson, Peabody, Thoreau, Very, Cranch, and others to explore their philosophical similarities and differences.
