Ralph Waldo Emerson is the father of
American literature in a series of
strikingly original essays written in
the mid 19th century he fundamentally
changed the way that America saw its
cultural and artistic possibilities and
he enabled a separation from
transatlantic literary traditions we
have listened too long he wrote to the
courtly muses of Europe
Emerson’s ejection of cultural
traditions brought about what one
contemporary called America’s
intellectual Declaration of Independence
and he established generational conflict
and transformation as commanding ideas
in American literature
Emerson himself hardly seemed destined
to fit a revolutionary mold he was born
in 1803 the son of a Boston preacher and
was descended from a line of New England
ministers that went back to the bedrock
of 17th century Puritanism when his
father died in 1811 his mother took in
boarders to pay the rent
still she sent her son to Harvard in
1817 and then Harvard Divinity School to
train for the priesthood in 1825 as a
young man Emerson was strongly
influenced by a remarkable aunt of his
Mary moody Emerson who though
self-taught had read everything from
Shakespeare to the romantics and had
formed a unique religious perspective
based on piety nature and literature
that would resonate powerfully in the
life and work of her nephew
so when Emerson was ordained in 1829
marrying the love of his life
Ellen Tucker in the same year he was
already unsatisfied with a formal nature
of New England religious orthodoxy when
Ellen died of tuberculosis just two
years later he resigned from the church
and soon after embarked on a trip to
Europe leaving on Christmas Day 1832 two
crucial things happened to Emerson on
that tour of Europe in Paris he went to
the famous Jud and a plant a botanical
and zoological garden there he had an
epiphany writing in his journal that
I feel the centipede in me the caiman
carp eagle and Fox I am moved by strange
sympathies
I say continually I will be a naturalist
Emerson’s insight was that nature is in
us a part of us and not just its higher
forms but in all its grotesque ory and
wildness the second thing that happened
on that tour was at Emerson met the
English Romantic poets Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and William Wordsworth and
found them rather ordinary dry and
conservative men the insight that
Emerson drew from this was that if great
men could be so ordinary why should not
ordinary men be great as he would write
a few years later meek young men grow up
in libraries believing it their duty to
accept the views which Cicero Locke
bacon have given forgetful that Cicero
Locke and bacon were only young men in
libraries when they wrote these books
Emerson had found two ideas that would
guide his life’s work that man and
nature are one and that everyone can
recognize that they are a uniquely
significant human being on his return to
America in 1833 Emerson became a
professional lecturer giving talks on
Natural History and literature in halls
around New England he remarried and had
several children presenting a stolid
bourgeois repear instill world but his
inner life was full of turbulence and
originality in his 1836 essay nature
Emerson outlined the germ of a new
philosophy a key element of this was the
importance of American originality in
its opening lines Emerson wrote our age
is retrospective it builds the Sepulcher
of the fathers it writes biographies
histories and criticism the foregoing
generations beheld God and nature face
to face we through their eyes why should
not we also enjoy an original relation
to the universe America needed to stop
looking back to its European heritage
and start looking about itself no past
moment was more important than the
moment no tradition was more important
than novelty no generation was better
than the current generation everything
that matters is here now insisted
Emerson and that here was America this
was an extension of Emerson’s ideas
about the significance of the individual
that came under the heading of what he
called self-reliance everywhere Emerson
looked he saw people leading lives that
were based on tradition that were
limited by religious forms and social
habits
no one could be themselves Emerson
thought because they were all too busy
being what they were supposed to be
Emerson wanted to get rid of each of
these burdens the past religion and
social forms so that each person could
find out who they truly were as he put
it history is an impertinence and an
injury our religion we have not chosen
but society has chosen for us and
society everywhere is in conspiracy
against the manhood of every one of its
members
we must he argued live from within
trusting nothing but our own intuitions
for as he concluded nothing is at last
sacred but the integrity of your own
mind
this leaves open a vital question what
is your nature once you have rid
yourself of history tradition and
religion what can be said is that it
isn’t necessarily self-indulgence Hedden
ism or narcissism rather it’s the
surrender to that force which Emerson
recognized back in the Shahada plant and
obedience to nature itself by Nature
Emerson seemed to mean the natural world
plants animals rocks and sky but what he
really meant was God Emerson was a
pantheist that is someone who believed
that God exists in every part of
creation from the smallest grain of sand
to the Stars but also crucially that the
divine spark is in each of us in
following ourselves we are therefore not
merely being fickle or selfish we are
rather releasing a divine will that
history society and organized religion
normally hide from us the individual as
Emerson writes is a God in row
but we have it within us by casting off
all custom to rebuild ourselves emerson
makes this pantheist connection explicit
in what are perhaps his most famous
lines crossing a bear common in snow
puddles at twilight under a clouded sky
without having in my thoughts any
occurrence of special good fortune I
have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration I am
glad to the brink of fear standing on
the bare ground my head bathed by the
blithe air and uplifted into infinite
space all mean egotism vanishes I become
a transparent eyeball
I am nothing I see all the currents of
the universal being circulate through me
I am part or particle of God
in the Romantic tradition on which
Emerson draws it is the sublime great
Mountains rushing torrents dark forests
which releases the inner vision as we
find ourselves in all of them for
Emerson it’s a perfectly dull walk
across an ordinary common on a dark
winter’s evening that brings him to the
brink of fear Emerson’s God is in the
snow puddles two stood there on the
common he disappears becoming nothing as
the currents of God flow through him
what is left is just a transparent
eyeball such transcendent moments are
rare but they reveal an essential
connection between nature God and man
they are one they also give for Emerson
a proper sense of each individual’s
importance as a part of God
transcendentalism became the name of the
movement that grew up around Emerson at
this time another aspect of the Epiphany
that was to have a profound effect on
American literature was the emphasis on
the value of the ordinary what Emerson
put forward in essays like the American
scholar and the poet was that the
American every day was a proper subject
for literature this was because for
Emerson the transcendentalist God is
everywhere and it’s the poet’s job to
reveal this there is no object he wrote
so foul that intense light will not make
it beautiful even the corpse has its own
Beauty this coming from a man who had
opened his first wife’s tomb a year
after her death to take a look the great
American writers who followed Emerson
were liberated by his work to look
around and write about what they saw and
how they lived transforming the everyday
into a vital symbol of something higher
and more elusive Henry David Thoreau’s
two years at Walden Pond became a book
that showed the cosmos reflected in the
depths of the waters of a mere pond the
poet Walt Whitman said I was simmering
simmering simmering Emerson brought me
to a boil Emily Dickinson heard a fly
and could write of the other side of
death
the novelist Herman Melville took a
whaling voyage and made it an allegory
of America
P realism and the defiance of nature in
the 20th century the American critic
Harold Bloom looked back at Emerson’s
originality and saw in it the origin of
the strong tradition of American poets
from Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens to
John Ashbery Emerson’s legacy to
American literature and culture and
indeed to the world was one of ceaseless
invention and forward momentum as he put
it I unsettle all things no facts are to
me sacred none are profane I simply
experiment an endless seeker with no
people have always had trouble
pronouncing his name if you don’t speak
German it’s not at all obvious how
you’re supposed to say it a safe bet is
to start with a hard was a great Czech
writer who has come to own a part of the
human emotional spectrum which we can
now call the Kafka esque and which thanks to him were
American literature in a series of
strikingly original essays written in
the mid 19th century he fundamentally
changed the way that America saw its
cultural and artistic possibilities and
he enabled a separation from
transatlantic literary traditions we
have listened too long he wrote to the
courtly muses of Europe
Emerson’s ejection of cultural
traditions brought about what one
contemporary called America’s
intellectual Declaration of Independence
and he established generational conflict
and transformation as commanding ideas
in American literature
Emerson himself hardly seemed destined
to fit a revolutionary mold he was born
in 1803 the son of a Boston preacher and
was descended from a line of New England
ministers that went back to the bedrock
of 17th century Puritanism when his
father died in 1811 his mother took in
boarders to pay the rent
still she sent her son to Harvard in
1817 and then Harvard Divinity School to
train for the priesthood in 1825 as a
young man Emerson was strongly
influenced by a remarkable aunt of his
Mary moody Emerson who though
self-taught had read everything from
Shakespeare to the romantics and had
formed a unique religious perspective
based on piety nature and literature
that would resonate powerfully in the
life and work of her nephew
so when Emerson was ordained in 1829
marrying the love of his life
Ellen Tucker in the same year he was
already unsatisfied with a formal nature
of New England religious orthodoxy when
Ellen died of tuberculosis just two
years later he resigned from the church
and soon after embarked on a trip to
Europe leaving on Christmas Day 1832 two
crucial things happened to Emerson on
that tour of Europe in Paris he went to
the famous Jud and a plant a botanical
and zoological garden there he had an
epiphany writing in his journal that
I feel the centipede in me the caiman
carp eagle and Fox I am moved by strange
sympathies
I say continually I will be a naturalist
Emerson’s insight was that nature is in
us a part of us and not just its higher
forms but in all its grotesque ory and
wildness the second thing that happened
on that tour was at Emerson met the
English Romantic poets Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and William Wordsworth and
found them rather ordinary dry and
conservative men the insight that
Emerson drew from this was that if great
men could be so ordinary why should not
ordinary men be great as he would write
a few years later meek young men grow up
in libraries believing it their duty to
accept the views which Cicero Locke
bacon have given forgetful that Cicero
Locke and bacon were only young men in
libraries when they wrote these books
Emerson had found two ideas that would
guide his life’s work that man and
nature are one and that everyone can
recognize that they are a uniquely
significant human being on his return to
America in 1833 Emerson became a
professional lecturer giving talks on
Natural History and literature in halls
around New England he remarried and had
several children presenting a stolid
bourgeois repear instill world but his
inner life was full of turbulence and
originality in his 1836 essay nature
Emerson outlined the germ of a new
philosophy a key element of this was the
importance of American originality in
its opening lines Emerson wrote our age
is retrospective it builds the Sepulcher
of the fathers it writes biographies
histories and criticism the foregoing
generations beheld God and nature face
to face we through their eyes why should
not we also enjoy an original relation
to the universe America needed to stop
looking back to its European heritage
and start looking about itself no past
moment was more important than the
moment no tradition was more important
than novelty no generation was better
than the current generation everything
that matters is here now insisted
Emerson and that here was America this
was an extension of Emerson’s ideas
about the significance of the individual
that came under the heading of what he
called self-reliance everywhere Emerson
looked he saw people leading lives that
were based on tradition that were
limited by religious forms and social
habits
no one could be themselves Emerson
thought because they were all too busy
being what they were supposed to be
Emerson wanted to get rid of each of
these burdens the past religion and
social forms so that each person could
find out who they truly were as he put
it history is an impertinence and an
injury our religion we have not chosen
but society has chosen for us and
society everywhere is in conspiracy
against the manhood of every one of its
members
we must he argued live from within
trusting nothing but our own intuitions
for as he concluded nothing is at last
sacred but the integrity of your own
mind
this leaves open a vital question what
is your nature once you have rid
yourself of history tradition and
religion what can be said is that it
isn’t necessarily self-indulgence Hedden
ism or narcissism rather it’s the
surrender to that force which Emerson
recognized back in the Shahada plant and
obedience to nature itself by Nature
Emerson seemed to mean the natural world
plants animals rocks and sky but what he
really meant was God Emerson was a
pantheist that is someone who believed
that God exists in every part of
creation from the smallest grain of sand
to the Stars but also crucially that the
divine spark is in each of us in
following ourselves we are therefore not
merely being fickle or selfish we are
rather releasing a divine will that
history society and organized religion
normally hide from us the individual as
Emerson writes is a God in row
but we have it within us by casting off
all custom to rebuild ourselves emerson
makes this pantheist connection explicit
in what are perhaps his most famous
lines crossing a bear common in snow
puddles at twilight under a clouded sky
without having in my thoughts any
occurrence of special good fortune I
have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration I am
glad to the brink of fear standing on
the bare ground my head bathed by the
blithe air and uplifted into infinite
space all mean egotism vanishes I become
a transparent eyeball
I am nothing I see all the currents of
the universal being circulate through me
I am part or particle of God
in the Romantic tradition on which
Emerson draws it is the sublime great
Mountains rushing torrents dark forests
which releases the inner vision as we
find ourselves in all of them for
Emerson it’s a perfectly dull walk
across an ordinary common on a dark
winter’s evening that brings him to the
brink of fear Emerson’s God is in the
snow puddles two stood there on the
common he disappears becoming nothing as
the currents of God flow through him
what is left is just a transparent
eyeball such transcendent moments are
rare but they reveal an essential
connection between nature God and man
they are one they also give for Emerson
a proper sense of each individual’s
importance as a part of God
transcendentalism became the name of the
movement that grew up around Emerson at
this time another aspect of the Epiphany
that was to have a profound effect on
American literature was the emphasis on
the value of the ordinary what Emerson
put forward in essays like the American
scholar and the poet was that the
American every day was a proper subject
for literature this was because for
Emerson the transcendentalist God is
everywhere and it’s the poet’s job to
reveal this there is no object he wrote
so foul that intense light will not make
it beautiful even the corpse has its own
Beauty this coming from a man who had
opened his first wife’s tomb a year
after her death to take a look the great
American writers who followed Emerson
were liberated by his work to look
around and write about what they saw and
how they lived transforming the everyday
into a vital symbol of something higher
and more elusive Henry David Thoreau’s
two years at Walden Pond became a book
that showed the cosmos reflected in the
depths of the waters of a mere pond the
poet Walt Whitman said I was simmering
simmering simmering Emerson brought me
to a boil Emily Dickinson heard a fly
and could write of the other side of
death
the novelist Herman Melville took a
whaling voyage and made it an allegory
of America
P realism and the defiance of nature in
the 20th century the American critic
Harold Bloom looked back at Emerson’s
originality and saw in it the origin of
the strong tradition of American poets
from Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens to
John Ashbery Emerson’s legacy to
American literature and culture and
indeed to the world was one of ceaseless
invention and forward momentum as he put
it I unsettle all things no facts are to
me sacred none are profane I simply
experiment an endless seeker with no
people have always had trouble
pronouncing his name if you don’t speak
German it’s not at all obvious how
you’re supposed to say it a safe bet is
to start with a hard was a great Czech
writer who has come to own a part of the
human emotional spectrum which we can
now call the Kafka esque and which thanks to him were
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