Emily Dickinson: Transcendentalist Experience through Imagination.

The early 19th century spawned a new type of thought: transcendentalism. Introduced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, transcendentalists believe man as an individual can become spiritually consumed with nature and himself through experiences within nature. These ideas, however, are a starkly contrasted by Emily Dickinson, who chose to branch off this path. Dickinson believed, unlike Emerson and Thoreau, that a transcendentalist experience could be achieved without extensive natural experiences, but through imagination …

…where the power of imagination took the place of experience. She never sought fame or fortune, saying that publication was "the Auction/ Of the Mind of Man." She embraced feminism and wrote about it vividly in her poems. Her bold feminine statements to society proved that the confine of ones surroundings is not enough to capture the power of the mind. --Add a works cited page. Quotes can be found easily in a Literaute textbook.