A Religious Demonstration

First Wave Transcendentalism consisted, as Perry Miller observed, of "young Unitarians who between 1830 and 1840 revolted against Unitarianism (even those who came from non-Unitarian backgrounds, like Alcott and Brownson, had to move through a Unitarian stage in order thereafter to become Transcendentalists by rejecting it!)...The protest of these few troubled spirits against what their society had confidently assumed was the crowning triumph of progress and enlightenment is therefore a portent for America, all the more because their protest was the result of no organized indoctrination, but was entirely spontaneous and instinctive...The Transcendentalists did not need to be unified upon any one creed or platform because they were already united in the community of the heart; they had all grown miserable and disgusted within what Emerson called 'the corpse-cold Unitarianism of Brattle Street and Harvard College.' This was the ethos of their youth; their ultimate condemnation of this ethos, after an agony of soul-searching and fumbling, is nothing less than the first of a succession of revolts by the youth of America against American Philistinism. Which is to imply...that the Transcendental movement is most accurately to be defined as a religious demonstration...Unless [Transcendentalist] literature be read as fundamentally an expression of a religious radicalism in revolt against a rational conservatism, it will not be understood; if it is so interpreted, then the deeper undertone can be heard. Once it is heard, the literature becomes, even in its more fatuous reaches, a protest of the human spirit against emotional starvation."

~Miller, The Transcendentalists, 7-8.