fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007 - Ethical Culture ...

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Poems(1803—1882)Emerson was nineteenth-century America’s most notable prophetand sage. He was an apostle of progress and optimism, andhis dedication to self-reliant individualism inspired his fellowTranscentialist Bronson Alcott to observe, “Emerson’s church consistsof one member—himself; He waits for the world to agree with him.“Emerson was born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister and thedescendents of a long line of distinguished New England clergymen.He was educated at the Boston Latin School and at Harvard. Afterhis graduation from college in 1821 Emerson taught in a Bostonschool for young ladies. In 1825 he entered the Harvard DivinitySchool, where he absorbed the liberal, intellectualized Christianityof Unitarianism. It rejected the Calvinist ideas of predestinationand Iota/depravity, substituting instead a faith in the saving graceof divine love and a belie! in the eventual brotherhood of man in aKingdom of Heaven on earth.In 1829 Emerson was ordained the Unitarian minister of the SecondChurch of Boston. He was a popular and successful preacher, butafter three years he had come to doubt the efficacy of the sacrament ofthe Lord’s Supper, and his growing objections to even the remnantsof Christian dogma surviving in early nineteenth-centuryUnitarianism led him to conclude that “to be a good minister it wasnecessary to leave the ministers.”After preaching his farewell sermon Emerson went on a tour ofEurope, where he met Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth and wasstrongly influenced by the ideas of European Romanticism. Uponreturning to America, he began his lifelong career as a public lecturer,which took him to meeting halts and lyceums in cities and villagesthroughout much of the nation. He bought a house in Concord,Massachusetts, and there he associated with Thoreau, Hawthorne,Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and others who belonged to theinformal Transcendentalist Club, organized for the “exchange ofthought among those interested in the new views in philosophy,theology, and literature.”In Concord, Emerson became the chief spokesman oftranscendentalism in America. His philosophy was a compound ofYankee Puritanism and Unitarianism merged with the teachings ofEuropean romanticism. The word “transcendental” had long beenused in philosophy to describe truths that were beyond the reach ofman’s limited senses, and as a transcendentalist, Emerson arguedfor intuition as a guide to universal truth. He believed that God isall-loving and all-pervading, that His presence in men made themdivine and assured their salvation. Emerson believed that there isan essential unity in apparent variety, that there is a correspondencebetween the world and the spirit, that nature is an image in whichman can perceive the divine.Emerson’s beliefs were a balance of skepticism and faith, stirredby moral fervor. To many of his readers they have seemed neithercoherent nor complete. His early writings were rejected as “the latestform of infidelity. “He has been called “St. Ralph, the Optimist”and charged with having a serene ignorance of the true nature ofevil. His exaltation of intuition over reason has been dismissed as ajustification of infantile enthusiasms; his celebration of individualismhas been judged an argument for mindless self-assertiveness.Emerson was a seer and poet, not a man of cool logic. In his letters,essays, and poems he sought to inspire a cultural rejuvenation, totransmit to his listeners and readers his own lofty perceptions. Hisappeal lay in his rejection of outworn traditions and in his faithin goodness and inevitable progress. His words both dazzled andpuzzled his audience. Like his philosophy, his writing seemed tolack organization, but it swarmed with epigrams and memorablepassages. The nineteenth century found him a man who had“something capital to say about everything, “ and his ideas influencedAmerican writers from Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, and EmilyDickinson in the nineteenth century to E. A. Robinson, RobertFrost, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens in the twentieth century.Emerson’s perceptions of man and nature as symbols of universaltruth encouraged the development of the symbolist movement inAmerican writing. His assertion that even the commonplaces ofAmerican the were worthy of the highest art helped to establish anational literature. His repudiation of established traditions andinstitutions encouraged a literary revolution; his ideas, expressedin his own writing and in the works of others, have been takenas an intellectual foundation for movements of social changethat have profoundly altered modern America. Emerson wasno political revolutionary. He preached harmony in a discordantage, and he recognized the needs of human society as incompatiblewith unrestrained individualism. As he grew older he becameincreasingly conservative, but he remained a firm advocate of selfreliantidealism, and in his writings and in the example of his lifeEmerson has endured as a guide for those who would shun al/foolishconsistencies and escape blind submission to fate.EACH AND ALLLittle thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clownOf thee from the hill-top looking down;The heifer that lows in the upland farm,Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;The sexton, tolling his hell at noon,Deems not that great NapoleonStops his horse, and lists with delight,Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;Nor knowest thou what argumentThy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent.216 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007