Walden Poster
1. Vocabulary for Friday--last 10 words from list
2. Finish Dead Poets
3. Finish notes on Dead Poets
(1 page of examples from the film illustrating that the ideas in the film follow the ideas of
Transcendentalist thought.)
Transcendentalists
4. Read the following poem by dead poet par excellence, Walt Whitman:
"
When I heard the learned astronomer"
Common traits of American Transcendentalists
As defined in "The Transcendentalist" by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
- Respect for intuitions
- Withdrawal from labor and competition
- Pursuit of a critical, solitary lifestyle
- Consciousness of the disproportion between a person's faculties and the work provided for them.
- Repel influences
- Shun general society
- An appreciation for nature, specifically nature's symbolism
- Life in rural settings
- Work and play in solitude
- Have a passion for the extraordinary
- Not good for citizens or members of society
- Unwilling to bear their part of public and private burdens
- Childlike; joyous, affectionate, susceptible, more than average wish to be loved
- Make extreme demands on human nature
- Disappointed in humanity
- Sociable
- Lack private ends to their means
- United with every trait and talent of beauty and power
- Idealistic
- Admits the unreliability of the senses
- Respects the government only so far as it reinforces the law of their minds
- Reality originates from an "unknown centre" inside of themselves
- Accepts spiritual doctrine
- Do not share in public religious rites, enterprises of education, missions foreign or domestic, activism, or voting
- Essentially dead or paralyzed
- Even though their participation in society is out of character, they choose to participate as dissidents
- Reject routine, because there is not much virtue in it
- Constantly waiting for a high command
- Lovers and worshippers of society
- Disdain for organized education
"Oh me oh life, what good among these. What good are these? That you are here, and may contribute a verse"--Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman's poem "
When I heard the learned astronomy"
