Transcendentalism is a literary and philosophical movement, associated with Henry David Thoreau and the counterculture, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and the scientist and is knowable by intuition. Imagination and individuality are associated with the term. Henry David Thoreau, a leading philosopher and poet, was a leading transcendentalist. He compiled a novel called Walden, a non-fiction account of his time at Walden Pond where he truly explored nature and its transcendental quality. Similar to Thoreau, the counterculture was a nonconformist group in the 1960s and 1970s that went against society's norms and became its own subculture. They too were highly regarded as transcendental. The counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s was strongly constrained by the ideas of Henry David Thoreau and shared comparable facets showing a solid foundation on the importance of nature, as well as imagination and the ideal of life belonging to a higher mind. , but the counterculture moved away and transformed into its own, in the direction of individualism and government relations. Henry David Thoreau's ideas had an impact on the counterculture and their ideas. Thoreau went into the woods, built himself a house, and practically lived off the nature around him. “All nature was tonic to him” (About Thoreau). He had a great passion for the true meaning of nature. His ideal that nature had great importance was passed on to the counterculture generation. Those of the counterculture saw a return to the land ethic. The counterculture focused on pollution. The importance of nature took precedence over that of the counterculture of the 1960s. In the early 1970s, an Earth...... middle of paper ......vile Disobedience'" Henry Thoreau and 'Civil Disobedience' Np, nd Web April 17, 2014. "I like being alone. I have never found companionship as pleasant as solitude. Most of us are lonelier when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our rooms. April 21, 2014. “The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau.” The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, April 22, 2014. Thoreau, Henry David, and Robert F. Sayre. the Concord and Merrimack rivers; Walden, or, Life in the Woods; the woods of Maine New York: literary classics of the United States, 1985. PrintThoreau, Henry David, or, Life in the Woods. : Dover Publications, 1995. Print. Wikimedia Foundation, nd Web.. 2014.