transcendentalist

For e.e. cummings, like earlier American transcendentalist poets like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, paying attention was everything.

Decades before, in the 1840s, New England transcendentalists had organized Brook Farm in Massachusetts, born from a utopian template of a community of shared labor and rewards that could also be creatively stimulating.

Even the eminent Fuller — the first editor of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalist journal, the Dial, and literary editor of the New York Tribune — signed her columns with an asterisk, or simply “F.”

She also became drawn to Thoreau — his storytelling powers, his deep reading of nature, his staunch abolitionism as one among Concord’s literary luminaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, known as “transcendentalists.”

Your grandfather was a transcendentalist who wrote about his experiences of communicating with the deceased and held séances for the family, and your father was also an author who published books on U.F.O.s.