Alcott

Abstract None of the American Transcendentalists was so ridiculed as Amos Bronson Alcott. Throughout his life, Alcott was a thoroughgoing religious radical whose pronouncements often were too much even for Transcendentalists like Emerson, although they themselves had abandoned Unitarian liberalism as too conservative. Although many critics have noted and lampooned Alcott’s eccentric modes of “prophetic” expression from his “Orphic Sayings” in The Dial onward—some considering him deluded and even insane—much in Alcott’s work becomes far more comprehensible when one considers a central hidden source of his inspiration: German mysticism exemplified in the work of seven-teenth-century Protestant mystic Jacob Böhme.