http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americannovel/timeline/romanticism.

html 1820-1860s romanticism :

A multifaceted movement in music, painting, and literature that originated in Germany and Britain during the 18th century. Although it is notoriously impossible to define, romanticism is generally a reaction against rationalism and materialism. It can be broadly represented as a series of beliefs: in the primacy of the imagination rather than in a purely rational mode of apprehending and understanding reality; in the imagination's transformative power to invest reality with meaning; in the importance of individuality and personal freedom, and in the value of spontaneity and self-expression as opposed to artificiality and restraint. Commonly, there is also a pastoral element to romanticism, an exaltation of untamed nature and a consequent desire to find and express one's own individual nature. Other romantic characteristics include an admiration for the individuated hero who has broken from social restraints and a representation of the poet as prophet or visionary. Although often represented as primarily an aesthetic movement, romanticism has important political, social, and nationalistic dimensions. Its support for the ideals of democracy and republicanism derives from a fundamental belief in human equality, while as an optimistic, utopian philosophy, romanticism also envisions the perfectibility of the individual and of society through self-realization, progress, and reform. In romantic thought there is often an idealization of primitive "natural" societies, and antagonism toward what is perceived as repressive artificial civilization. Romanticism is crucial to American culture, to the extent that the very creation of the United States has been considered an expression of romantic thought. It was the central movement of the American Renaissance, being most readily mediated through transcendentalism, and it continues to exert a profound influence on American thought and writing. In this respect the importance of Ralph Waldo Emerson can hardly be exaggerated, since he both mediated European romantic thought and adapted it to the American intellectual situation. Romanticism perhaps has its fullest and least ambiguous expression in the work of Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, but it has been a central concern in the work of numerous writers, notably James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant (17941878), Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Wallace Stevens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane (1899-1932), Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), and Sylvia Plath.

1830-1860s transcendentalism:
Literary, religious, and philosophical movement originating in New England in the mid-1830s and remaining influential until the 1860s. The philosophy behind transcendentalism was an eclectic mix of English romanticism (especially as mediated by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle), antirationality, antipuritanism, the mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg, and aspects of Eastern philosophies. The term "transcendentalism," which was actually coined by those who ridiculed the movement for its dreamy abstractions, derives from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who wrote of the need to transcend reason alone for a true understanding of reality. The central beliefs of transcendentalism were in unity between nature and God, the presence of God in each individual, and the potential perfectibility of humans. These core beliefs generated others, particularly in individualism and in the self-reliance extolled by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote that "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." Although transcendentalism was criticized for its supposed otherworldliness, it did have a strong practical element, evident in the formation of the utopian community of Brook Farm, in its anti-institutionalism, and in the dedication of many of its members to social reform. Writers who were either transcendentalists or closely associated with the movement include Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), Emerson, Margaret Fuller (1810-50), and Henry David Thoreau. Key transcendentalist works include Emerson's essays, especially "Nature" (1836), "The American Scholar" (1837), "The Over-Soul" (1841), and "Self-Reliance" (1841), and Thoreau's "Walden" (1854). THE DIAL was the journal produced by the group. The influence of transcendentalism was such that it touched even those writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson who were uneasy about it or who rejected it outright.