“Life is an ecstasy,” writes Emerson, at once celebrating life and rendering irrelevant all the specific characteristics of any actual experience. Similar neglect of the very lived experience he is calling magnificent colors the end of “The Poet”:

As these quotations indicate, experience is newly valued in Transcendentalism, but this value depends upon a certain indifference to the quality of such experience. This is part of Transcendentalism's rejection of Lockean empiricism, particularly the account of experience as the objective process in which a blank subject takes in knowledge of the concrete world. Yet the reaction isn't exactly to embrace the subject, either in the sense of the all-important ego identified with Emerson's “Self-Reliance,” or even in a more immanent interaction of self and world, for Transcendentalism explicitly rejected the definition of the subjective as the personal. In this regard, Christopher Newfield's objection, “Why do we call this self-reliance?” is accurate – although I would add that it isn't self-submission either.