The New England transcendentalists were an influential but decidedly heterogeneous group of young writers, critics, philosophers, theologians, and social reformers whose activities centered in and around Concord, Massachusetts, from about 1836 to 1860. Insofar as they can be considered to have subscribed to a common body of doctrine, their leader and spokesman was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). Apart from Platonism and Unitarian Christianity, the chief formative intellectual influence on the group was German idealism. It was not, however, the dense and difficult epistemological works of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel that primarily attracted the transcendentalists; although nearly all had made some attempt to read the German philosophers, very few had persevered to the point of mastering them. Rather, it was the more personalized and poetic expressions of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Novalis, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle...