Hi! I don’t have any crazy thoughts provoking questions or ideas for the blog (at least not yet), but I wasn’t able to be in class week because of a conference I was attending out of town. As I was doing the readings from this past week, as well as reading over the notes a friend (thanks Tanner) sent me from Thursday’s class, I was just wondering what people’s thoughts on transcendentalism, the poets we are studying, and just the general purpose of this course are. What big ideas or important details did you take away from the readings and Thursday’s class?

Based off of the readings, it feels like transcendentalism, and therefore this course and the works we are going to read within it, focus heavily on the idea of humanity and that people’s lives should not be tied to, dependent on, or only fulfilled by conforming to the capitalist society that we live in. To be truly satisfied, we need to have emotion and social connections with one another, which is what WW and ED seem to have used poetry to do; it is a medium through which they can create those connections with others not just for themselves, but for people who read those works and then connect with each other (like us in this course!). I know I’m posting this pretty soon before class tomorrow (sorry Dr. Scanlon…), but any notes or thoughts are super helpful, and I’m excited to actually get to be in class and a part of discussion tomorrow!