transcendentalism definition poetry
n. 1. often Transcendentalism A literary and philosophical movement arising in 19th-century New England, associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller and asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends empirical and scientific reality and is knowable through intuition.2.ranscendentalism. 1. any philosophy based upon the doctrine that the principles of reality are to be discovered only through the analysis of the processes of thought, as Kantianism. 2. a philosophy emphasizing the intuitive and spiritual above the empirical, as the philosophy of Emerson. Cf.