Transcendentalism Topic Page from Credo ReferenceThe middle decades of the nineteenth century, sometimes known as the American Renaissance, yielded some of the most enduring literary works and influential philosophical ideas in American history. The Transcendentalist movement was central to defining this period, and nineteenth-century thinkers responded to it in different ways. While Emerson and Thoreau fostered it, Hawthorne and Poe criticized it; while Melville, though never part of New England Transcendentalism, was ambivalent.