Transcendentalist/Romantic writing
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Self-Reliance” (1841) [online reading]; humans as part of Universe’s absolute good
Henry David Thoreau: “Civil Disobedience” (1849/66), Walden (1854) [online reading]; divinity in nature’s “unspotted innocence”
Importance of imagination over reason: mystical, individual, democratic. (Bryant, Longfellow, Whitman)
The darker side: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” [online reading] (1845)