The Romantic era produced a plethora of great writing. It was a period of change and emancipation. While the Classical era had strict laws of balance and restraint, the Romantic era moved away from that by allowing artistic freedom, experimentation, and creativity. Romantic ideas centered around art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art, rather than science, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. The development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If ones' self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering ( ). Unlike European groups, transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences – on the unique viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendentalists Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values. Certainly, the New England Transcendentalists--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates including William Wordsworth and William Butler Yeats -- were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement.
             Thoreau was the trailblazer for most of the transcendentalists, his masterpiece Walden, a result of two years living in a cabin, shaped the views of writer to come. In Walden, Thoreau not only tests the theories of Transcendentalism, he re-enacts the collective American experience of the 19th century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his contribution would be to renew a se...