ralph waldo emerson essay the poet

ENGL405: The American Renaissance

Overview of ralph waldo emerson and "the poet".

Read this critical overview of Emerson and "The Poet".

While now best known as a philosopher, essayist, and lecturer, Emerson, at different times in his career, avowed that he saw himself first and foremost as a poet. First appearing in his collection Essays: Second Series (1844), "The Poet" marks Emerson's most sustained attempt at defining the vocation of the poet and his central importance within Emerson's broader philosophical thought. Like all of Emerson's essays, "The Poet" is difficult to summarize as it moves from point to point, working more through suggestiveness and the reworking of similar ideas in slightly different formulations rather than through sustained argument. Certain chief ideas stand out, however, echoing Emerson's comments throughout his career on the role of art in human life – the celebration of intuition and inspiration over learning and technique; the connections among the material universe of nature, the individual mind, and the divine, universal, spiritual truth; and a tension between an egalitarian emphasis on the capacity of every human to access this truth and his exaltation of the few who most fully provoke or lead the rest to see the truth.

One of Emerson's most famous phrases appears early in "The Poet", placing him squarely within Romanticism's emphasis on organic, as opposed to imposed, form: "For it is not meters, but a meter-making argument that makes a poem, – a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing". While most of Emerson's poetry was fairly conventional in its form, in terms of meter and rhyme, stanzaic construction, etc., he emphasizes the form should follow from the inspiration, the feeling, or thought that creates the poem and gives it life. Analogizing the poem to a living entity, the form, like the body of an animal or plant, should grow out of its inner being, should be an extension and expression of its spiritual life. A true poem, in this way, is a unique expression, a living object, as opposed to merely technically brilliant writing ("a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms" through all of which we hear "the ground-tone of conventional life"). It was what he saw as the emptiness of such writing that led Emerson to dismiss Poe as "the jingle-man".

In opposition to Poe's focus on poetic design, Emerson emphasizes intuition. Repeatedly, in "The Poet", Emerson suggests that the poet does little at all, except to allow "the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him". It is through "abandonment to the nature of things" that the poet frees himself from his narrow individual view of the world and his thinking begins to "take its direction from celestial life". In this way, "Imagination" is less creative in itself than merely a "very high sort of seeing . . . by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others". The poet, in this way, takes on the role of the prophet or the minister, bringing a message of the divinity of nature and of humankind to his listeners.

As such, Emerson elevates the poet to a supreme position within society. He is "representative", meaning he "stands among partial men for the complete man". While most men (Emerson elaborates this idea more fully in the opening of "The American Scholar") only develop a limited part of their complete humanity, a humanity rooted in its divine nature, the poet can speak for the fullness of human existence. Thus, "he is a sovereign, and stands on the center", reminding all of humankind that the material world has a "supersensual utility", namely that things do not exist in and for themselves but represent a higher and divine truth. Because poets break through our normal way of seeing the world, Emerson twice refers to them as "liberating gods". In particular, poets help the individual "to escape the custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he is enclosed". By "stimulating" us to imagine the world in new ways, poets free us from our old thought. Unlike the mystic, then, who "nails a symbol to one sense", the poet must always keep in mind that "all symbols are fluxional", a flux that mirrors the development of nature, the movement of the mind, and the organization of the universe.

These various definitions and characterizations of the poet almost immediately come into apparent contradiction. Each new poem must have a life of its own, must bring to life a new truth, yet "poetry was all written before time was". The poet is nothing but a vessel for the divine spirit to speak through, yet he becomes a god himself. The poet stands alone, above all of humanity, and thus "the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology", yet "every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature". These tensions or contradictions are central to Emerson's philosophy. The poet – and every individual – gives expression to an experience never before known, yet the deepest underlying truth of that experience exceeds any individual existence and reflects the laws at the core of the universe. Poetry must thus reflect both those universal laws even as giving expression to their particular manifestation in an individual life. When we truly live according to our innermost selves, we, in fact, transcend the self, for we tap into a divine, universal spirit that pervades all of creation. Even in our less conscious moments, our existence reflects that truth, the truth at the core of what Emerson calls poetry. Emerson's understanding of the "Universe" as "the externization of the soul" thus leads him to identifying the poet's chief task as making that relationship real to us. At the same time, however, he contends that we already recognize that relationship, through our commitment to the spirit of things in our employment and our "attachment . . . to the use of emblems:" "The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics" through their recognition of a spiritual truth and meaning behind material form.

Emerson extends poetry, in this way, to almost any form of creative thought or expression that potentially "re-attaches things to nature and the Whole" and thus contends that poetry is "the true science", for the poet "does not stop at [material] facts, but employs them as signs". Emerson's poetics is often characterized, due to statements such as these, as simply a type of Neoplatonic idealism. Poetry – and the material world in general – is only useful and important to the extent it can give us evidence of, or suggest, the spiritual reality lying behind and beyond the physical world: "nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors". While this sort of idealism represents a strong element of Emerson's thought, he extends almost equal attention to the material manifestation of those spiritual truths – and the importance of attending to the diversity of those manifestations – as well as to the material effects of the spiritual renovation enabled by poetry. This focus on the specific conditions of the physical world undergirds his famous call towards the end of the essay for a distinctly American poet. The problem, as Emerson diagnoses it, is that "We do not with sufficient plainness or sufficient profoundness address ourselves to live, nor dare we chant our own times and social circumstances". While the true poet will lead us beyond the everyday and past merely contemporary concerns and ways of thinking, he can only do so by engaging with the world as it exists in the here and now. The American poet has a great task at hand, for "Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boasts and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung". In this passage, often taken as inspiring Walt Whitman's poetic vision of the U. S., Emerson grounds American poetry in the material conditions of the nation – its economy, its politics, its demographics, and geography – even as he continues to view poetry as bespeaking "the path of the creator to his work", a path "ideal and eternal". This tension – between the universal and eternal and its necessary material manifestation as the only route to experiencing or knowing the ideal – lies at the heart of Emerson's understanding of poetry and his philosophy in general and would be a framework his followers and critics would struggle with for years to come.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American Transcendentalist poet, philosopher and essayist during the 19th century. One of his best-known essays is "Self-Reliance.”

(1803-1882)

Who Was Ralph Waldo Emerson?

In 1821, Ralph Waldo Emerson took over as director of his brother’s school for girls. In 1823, he wrote the poem "Good-Bye.” In 1832, he became a Transcendentalist, leading to the later essays "Self-Reliance" and "The American Scholar." Emerson continued to write and lecture into the late 1870s.

Early Life and Education

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of William and Ruth (Haskins) Emerson; his father was a clergyman, as many of his male ancestors had been. He attended the Boston Latin School, followed by Harvard University (from which he graduated in 1821) and the Harvard School of Divinity. He was licensed as a minister in 1826 and ordained to the Unitarian church in 1829.

Emerson married Ellen Tucker in 1829. When she died of tuberculosis in 1831, he was grief-stricken. Her death, added to his own recent crisis of faith, caused him to resign from the clergy.

Travel and Writing

In 1832 Emerson traveled to Europe, where he met with literary figures Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. When he returned home in 1833, he began to lecture on topics of spiritual experience and ethical living. He moved to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1834 and married Lydia Jackson in 1835.

American Transcendentalism

In the 1830s Emerson gave lectures that he afterward published in essay form. These essays, particularly “Nature” (1836), embodied his newly developed philosophy. “The American Scholar,” based on a lecture that he gave in 1837, encouraged American authors to find their own style instead of imitating their foreign predecessors.

Emerson became known as the central figure of his literary and philosophical group, now known as the American Transcendentalists. These writers shared a key belief that each individual could transcend, or move beyond, the physical world of the senses into deeper spiritual experience through free will and intuition. In this school of thought, God was not remote and unknowable; believers understood God and themselves by looking into their own souls and by feeling their own connection to nature.

The 1840s were productive years for Emerson. He founded and co-edited the literary magazine The Dial , and he published two volumes of essays in 1841 and 1844. Some of the essays, including “Self-Reliance,” “Friendship” and “Experience,” number among his best-known works. His four children, two sons and two daughters, were born in the 1840s.

Later Work and Life

Emerson’s later work, such as The Conduct of Life (1860), favored a more moderate balance between individual nonconformity and broader societal concerns. He advocated for the abolition of slavery and continued to lecture across the country throughout the 1860s.

By the 1870s the aging Emerson was known as “the sage of Concord.” Despite his failing health, he continued to write, publishing Society and Solitude in 1870 and a poetry collection titled Parnassus in 1874.

Emerson died on April 27, 1882, in Concord. His beliefs and his idealism were strong influences on the work of his protégé Henry David Thoreau and his contemporary Walt Whitman, as well as numerous others. His writings are considered major documents of 19th-century American literature, religion and thought.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Birth Year: 1803
• Birth date: May 25, 1803
• Birth State: Massachusetts
• Birth City: Boston
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American Transcendentalist poet, philosopher and essayist during the 19th century. One of his best-known essays is "Self-Reliance.”
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Fiction and Poetry
• Education and Academia
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Gemini
• Boston Public Latin School
• Harvard University
• Harvard Divinity School
• Death Year: 1882
• Death date: April 27, 1882
• Death State: Massachusetts
• Death City: Concord
• Death Country: United States

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• Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
• The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
• Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work.

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Ecstasy of Influence

By Dan Chiasson

In January of 1842, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s firstborn child, Waldo, contracted scarlet fever and died within a week. He was five. He had been his father’s exuberant companion, who had, Emerson wrote, “touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact & circumstance in the household.” Henry David Thoreau, who had lodged with the Emersons, “charmed Waldo by the variety of toys whistles boats popguns & all kinds of instruments which he could make & mend.” The death was a shock to the entire village of Concord, Massachusetts. When the nine-year-old Louisa May Alcott came to the Emersons’ door to ask about Waldo, she was greeted, she wrote, by an Emerson “worn with watching and changed by sorrow.” All he said was “Child, he is dead.” Alcott called it her “first glimpse of a great grief.”

But the grief did not feel real, or real enough, to Emerson. “I chiefly grieve that I cannot grieve,” he wrote in a letter the following week. The loss of Waldo spurred an essay, “Experience,” that contains one of the most startling passages in American literature:

The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.

This seems nearly callous, but that’s the point. Emerson had suffered tragic deaths before, and, partly as a result, had developed a theory of spiritual profit and loss: surely the greatest costs led to the richest benefits? When “a great man,” he wrote in “Compensation,” an earlier essay, is “pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.” But Waldo’s death was so profound that it went uncompensated, even by grief. It taught Emerson “nothing”; it was almost as though his son had never existed. Unluckily, swiftly, even happily, life goes on, only mildly “inconvenienced” by the most devastating loss imaginable.

“Experience” has a knife’s-edge, emergency intensity that is nowhere to be found in Emerson’s poems, collected in “Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry” (Harvard), edited by Albert J. von Frank. Prose was a zone of fruitful conflict for Emerson, who began his public life writing sermons. He entered Harvard Divinity School in 1825, at the age of twenty-one, to prepare for a career in the Unitarian ministry. Soon he was struck by a painful eye disease, likely caused by tuberculosis, and submitted to two cataract operations. According to Robert D. Richardson’s “Emerson: The Mind on Fire,” Emerson’s reading in Hume, and his knowledge of the “brilliantly clever arguments of Cicero,” began to erode his faith. His days were “slipping past him, one by one, in an irrevocable procession,” Richardson writes. He knew that the “proper emotion” wasn’t humility or even skepticism but “wonder.”

Emerson’s essays are like wonder handbooks: they tell you where to find it, how to use it, what to do when it fails you. “Nature,” “The Poet,” “Self-Reliance,” “Circles,” “Experience”: you can use these essays to become enchanted; many dejected secular people have gone to them regularly to see the world in renewed and refreshed terms of beauty. They outfit you for a walk in the woods or an ordinary morning. They are modular: you can remember bits of one, bits of another, mess up the order, mix and match. Their authority comes not from the Church or the ministry but from the power of their prose. Emerson must have realized that half of the people in church were there to hear language electrified by the preacher; his essays are, as Harold Bloom put it, “interior oratory,” free-range sermons that make their own occasions.

Emerson also wrote a poem about Waldo, “Threnody.” It is often quite beautiful, but it is dressed almost entirely in period costume. The period was the eighteen-forties, and the costume was woodsy, “native,” and politely anti-European. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who returned from Europe to teach modern languages at Harvard, was considered a boldly American poet: he wrote epics about Miles Standish and the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia. To Emerson’s contemporaries, experimentation in poetry meant writing about “the bobolink and the humble-bee” rather than the English nightingale and the skylark, which, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson’s correspondent and early advocate, wrote, Americans “might never have seen or heard anywhere.”

By these standards, “Threnody,” with its tableaux of American village life, is a masterpiece. Instead of nymphs and dryads, here are the rudiments of New England hill, garden, and scrub forest:

On that shaded day, Dark with more clouds than tempests are, When thou didst yield thy innocent breath In birdlike heavings unto death, Night came, and Nature had not thee; I said, ‘We are mates in misery.’ The morrow dawned with needless glow; Each snowbird chirped, each fowl must crow; Each tramper started; but the feet Of the most beautiful and sweet Of human youth had left the hill And garden,—they were bound and still.

This is one of the first inventories in verse of a distinctly New England winter, its “needless glow” awakening the tinny chirps of native snowbirds. Those unforgettable “birdlike heavings” of the child’s final breaths puncture a frigid silence known to anybody from Emerson’s neck of the woods. The image is borrowed from his journals, roused to this new formal occasion yet maintaining its fringe of untransformed anguish. But the poem quickly stifles its desperation in the prescribed comforts of noble sentiment and regular music.

The listlessness of Emerson’s poetry is surprising, given the veneration he expressed for the art. Some of his best prose is devoted to lobbying for the special advantages of poetry. These works are thrilling because they are written in thrilling sentences. This does not necessarily imply that Emerson’s poetry will be thrilling, though he must have intended his large claims for poetry to be tested on his own work. Like many of his essays, “The Poet” was printed with an original short lyric as its epigraph. The mediocrity of these poem-epigraphs is often emphasized by the essays’ attempts to honor them as superior forms of expression. It makes for a strangely rigged contest between turbocharged prose and the rickshaw verse it ostensibly reveres. Emerson’s “poet”—a “complete man,” a “man without impediment,” a “sayer” and “namer,” like Adam—would not have printed the lacklustre verses appended to “The Poet,” which venerate “Olympian bards” and “divine ideas” with rhymes as bouncy as a Super Ball.

In “Merlin I,” written, like “The Poet,” in the eighteen-forties, Emerson plays the unwinnable game of arguing in metre against metre and in rhyme against rhyme:

Thy trivial harp will never please Or fill my craving ear; Its chords should ring as blows the breeze, Free, peremptory, clear. No jingling serenader’s art, Nor tinkle of piano strings, Can make the wild blood start In its mystic springs.

Emerson kept an Aeolian harp in a window of his house. He intended to build in verse its equivalent, an instrument that nature could play. But the instrument itself was old-fashioned, gaudy, and domestic.

Emerson’s ideas were obviously badly served by the rickety verse structures he built for them. Seeing them strain and buckle under the weight of his mind and ambition led him, in “The Poet,” to call not only for a new kind of poem, which, at least in theory, he could have written, but for a wholly new kind of person, a person he wasn’t and didn’t want to become. His best poems—“Each and All,” “Brahma,” “The Rhodora,” “The Snow-Storm”—are refinements of oratory to the special rhetorical technologies of poetry. But his quicksilver prose was poetry, its sentences like signal flares launched one after another into the ether. What he says about the poet is truer of those astonishing prose performances:

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune. For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.

This passage, like so many in his great essays, describes itself, its own idiosyncratic “architecture.” This is what Emerson meant when he called for a literature of “insight and not of tradition.” Each sentence is an innovation, “a new thing.” Emerson didn’t want to write poems about the New World. He wanted poems to make the world new. It is fascinating, therefore, to see how he arranged for his own swift obsolescence. His poems sometimes feel intentionally slight, as though making way for the accelerating future, still at his back but quickly gaining on him. His prose was poetry by other means, calling for its own mirror image, a poetry whose “argument” trumped its forms.

Emerson was not the poet he had in mind in “The Poet.” In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville had prophesied an American poetry free of “legendary lays,” “old traditions,” “supernatural beings,” masks, and personifications. Americans led “petty” and “insipid” lives, “crowded with paltry interests”: their lives were “anti-poetic.” The only subject possible for an American poet was humankind; luckily, as Tocqueville wrote, “the poet needs no more.” Emerson, who spent most of his life cultivating the aura of an elder, called for “a brood of Titans” who would “run up the mountains of the West with the errand of genius and love.”

In July of 1855, Emerson got the poet he’d been calling for. He picked up a parcel from the Concord post office which contained the first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” sent anonymously from Brooklyn by its author. The book was unsigned, though there was a frontispiece portrait, the name “Walter Whitman” on the copyright page, and, inside, the jubilant line “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos. ” After a little hunting, Emerson found Whitman’s name and the address of his distributor in a newspaper advertisement. He then wrote his famous letter to Whitman, welcoming him to immortality: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.”

In response, Whitman published the letter in the book’s next edition, along with twenty new poems and his own open letter to Emerson of several thousand words celebrating “that vast basis of the supremacy of Individuality—that new moral American continent” whose “shores you found”:

I say you have led The States there—have led Me there. I say that none has ever done, or ever can do, a greater deed for The States, than your deed. Others may line out the lines, build cities, work mines, break up farms; it is yours to have been the original true Captain who put to sea, intuitive, positive, rendering the first report, to be told less by any report, and more by the mariners of a thousand bays, in each tack of their arriving and departing, many years after you.

Whitman was a fact of American life from that moment forward. It took a little longer for an equally important disciple to surface: Emily Dickinson, who treasured an edition of Emerson’s poems given to her by an admirer, and whose brother and sister-in-law, Austin and Susan Dickinson, had hosted Emerson many times at their handsome house, the Evergreens, just across the field from her home. Of course, Dickinson’s poems sound nothing like Emerson’s. He provided, for the wild synaptic activity of his protégés, the framework. He was their server. If Emerson’s poems had been just a little better than they were, we might not have American literature as we know it. Our greatest writers, seeing their own visions usurped, might have been content to remain his readers. ♦

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Photo from Amos Bronson Alcott 1882.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) began his career as a Unitarian minister in Boston, but achieved worldwide fame as a lecturer and the author of such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “History,” “The Over-Soul,” and “Fate.” Drawing on English and German Romanticism, Neoplatonism, Kantianism, and Hinduism, Emerson developed a metaphysics of process, an epistemology of moods, and an “existentialist” ethics of self-improvement. He influenced generations of Americans, from his friend Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, and in Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche, who takes up such Emersonian themes as power, fate, the uses of poetry and history, and the critique of Christianity.

1. Chronology of Emerson’s Life

2.1 education, 2.2 process, 2.3 morality, 2.4 christianity, 2.6 unity and moods, 3. emerson on slavery and race, 4.1 consistency, 4.2 early and late emerson, 4.3 sources and influence, works by emerson, selected writings on emerson, other internet resources, related entries, 2. major themes in emerson’s philosophy.

In “The American Scholar,” delivered as the Phi Beta Kappa Address in 1837, Emerson maintains that the scholar is educated by nature, books, and action. Nature is the first in time (since it is always there) and the first in importance of the three. Nature’s variety conceals underlying laws that are at the same time laws of the human mind: “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim” (CW1: 55). Books, the second component of the scholar’s education, offer us the influence of the past. Yet much of what passes for education is mere idolization of books — transferring the “sacredness which applies to the act of creation…to the record.” The proper relation to books is not that of the “bookworm” or “bibliomaniac,” but that of the “creative” reader (CW1: 58) who uses books as a stimulus to attain “his own sight of principles.” Used well, books “inspire…the active soul” (CW1: 56). Great books are mere records of such inspiration, and their value derives only, Emerson holds, from their role in inspiring or recording such states of the soul. The “end” Emerson finds in nature is not a vast collection of books, but, as he puts it in “The Poet,” “the production of new individuals,…or the passage of the soul into higher forms” (CW3:14).

The third component of the scholar’s education is action. Without it, thought “can never ripen into truth” (CW1: 59). Action is the process whereby what is not fully formed passes into expressive consciousness. Life is the scholar’s “dictionary” (CW1: 60), the source for what she has to say: “Only so much do I know as I have lived” (CW1:59). The true scholar speaks from experience, not in imitation of others; her words, as Emerson puts it, are “are loaded with life…” (CW1: 59). The scholar’s education in original experience and self-expression is appropriate, according to Emerson, not only for a small class of people, but for everyone. Its goal is the creation of a democratic nation. Only when we learn to “walk on our own feet” and to “speak our own minds,” he holds, will a nation “for the first time exist” (CW1: 70).

Emerson returned to the topic of education late in his career in “Education,” an address he gave in various versions at graduation exercises in the 1860s. Self-reliance appears in the essay in his discussion of respect. The “secret of Education,” he states, “lies in respecting the pupil.” It is not for the teacher to choose what the pupil will know and do, but for the pupil to discover “his own secret.” The teacher must therefore “wait and see the new product of Nature” (E: 143), guiding and disciplining when appropriate-not with the aim of encouraging repetition or imitation, but with that of finding the new power that is each child’s gift to the world. The aim of education is to “keep” the child’s “nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points” (E: 144). This aim is sacrificed in mass education, Emerson warns. Instead of educating “masses,” we must educate “reverently, one by one,” with the attitude that “the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil” (E: 154).

Emerson is in many ways a process philosopher, for whom the universe is fundamentally in flux and “permanence is but a word of degrees” (CW 2: 179). Even as he talks of “Being,” Emerson represents it not as a stable “wall” but as a series of “interminable oceans” (CW3: 42). This metaphysical position has epistemological correlates: that there is no final explanation of any fact, and that each law will be incorporated in “some more general law presently to disclose itself” (CW2: 181). Process is the basis for the succession of moods Emerson describes in “Experience,” (CW3: 30), and for the emphasis on the present throughout his philosophy.

Some of Emerson’s most striking ideas about morality and truth follow from his process metaphysics: that no virtues are final or eternal, all being “initial,” (CW2: 187); that truth is a matter of glimpses, not steady views. We have a choice, Emerson writes in “Intellect,” “between truth and repose,” but we cannot have both (CW2: 202). Fresh truth, like the thoughts of genius, comes always as a surprise, as what Emerson calls “the newness” (CW3: 40). He therefore looks for a “certain brief experience, which surprise[s] me in the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time…” (CW1: 213). This is an experience that cannot be repeated by simply returning to a place or to an object such as a painting. A great disappointment of life, Emerson finds, is that one can only “see” certain pictures once, and that the stories and people who fill a day or an hour with pleasure and insight are not able to repeat the performance.

Emerson’s basic view of religion also coheres with his emphasis on process, for he holds that one finds God only in the present: “God is, not was” (CW1:89). In contrast, what Emerson calls “historical Christianity” (CW1: 82) proceeds “as if God were dead” (CW1: 84). Even history, which seems obviously about the past, has its true use, Emerson holds, as the servant of the present: “The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary” (CW2: 5).

Emerson’s views about morality are intertwined with his metaphysics of process, and with his perfectionism, his idea that life has the goal of passing into “higher forms” (CW3:14). The goal remains, but the forms of human life, including the virtues, are all “initial” (CW2: 187). The word “initial” suggests the verb “initiate,” and one interpretation of Emerson’s claim that “all virtues are initial” is that virtues initiate historically developing forms of life, such as those of the Roman nobility or the Confucian junxi . Emerson does have a sense of morality as developing historically, but in the context in “Circles” where his statement appears he presses a more radical and skeptical position: that our virtues often must be abandoned rather than developed. “The terror of reform,” he writes, “is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices” (CW2: 187). The qualifying phrase “or what we have always esteemed such” means that Emerson does not embrace an easy relativism, according to which what is taken to be a virtue at any time must actually be a virtue. Yet he does cast a pall of suspicion over all established modes of thinking and acting. The proper standpoint from which to survey the virtues is the ‘new moment‘ — what he elsewhere calls truth rather than repose (CW2:202) — in which what once seemed important may appear “trivial” or “vain” (CW2:189). From this perspective (or more properly the developing set of such perspectives) the virtues do not disappear, but they may be fundamentally altered and rearranged.

Although Emerson is thus in no position to set forth a system of morality, he nevertheless delineates throughout his work a set of virtues and heroes, and a corresponding set of vices and villains. In “Circles” the vices are “forms of old age,” and the hero the “receptive, aspiring” youth (CW2:189). In the “Divinity School Address,” the villain is the “spectral” preacher whose sermons offer no hint that he has ever lived. “Self Reliance” condemns virtues that are really “penances” (CW2: 31), and the philanthropy of abolitionists who display an idealized “love” for those far away, but are full of hatred for those close by (CW2: 30).

Conformity is the chief Emersonian vice, the opposite or “aversion” of the virtue of “self-reliance.” We conform when we pay unearned respect to clothing and other symbols of status, when we show “the foolish face of praise” or the “forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us” (CW2: 32). Emerson criticizes our conformity even to our own past actions-when they no longer fit the needs or aspirations of the present. This is the context in which he states that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines” (CW2: 33). There is wise and there is foolish consistency, and it is foolish to be consistent if that interferes with the “main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent,…the upbuilding of a man” (CW1: 65).

If Emerson criticizes much of human life, he nevertheless devotes most of his attention to the virtues. Chief among these is what he calls “self-reliance.” The phrase connotes originality and spontaneity, and is memorably represented in the image of a group of nonchalant boys, “sure of a dinner…who would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one…” The boys sit in judgment on the world and the people in it, offering a free, “irresponsible” condemnation of those they see as “silly” or “troublesome,” and praise for those they find “interesting” or “eloquent.” (CW2: 29). The figure of the boys illustrates Emerson’s characteristic combination of the romantic (in the glorification of children) and the classical (in the idea of a hierarchy in which the boys occupy the place of lords or nobles).

Although he develops a series of analyses and images of self-reliance, Emerson nevertheless destabilizes his own use of the concept. “To talk of reliance,” he writes, “is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is” (CW 2:40). ‘Self-reliance’ can be taken to mean that there is a self already formed on which we may rely. The “self” on which we are to “rely” is, in contrast, the original self that we are in the process of creating. Such a self, to use a phrase from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, “becomes what it is.”

For Emerson, the best human relationships require the confident and independent nature of the self-reliant. Emerson’s ideal society is a confrontation of powerful, independent “gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus.” There will be a proper distance between these gods, who, Emerson advises, “should meet each morning, as from foreign countries, and spending the day together should depart, as into foreign countries” (CW 3:81). Even “lovers,” he advises, “should guard their strangeness” (CW3: 82). Emerson portrays himself as preserving such distance in the cool confession with which he closes “Nominalist and Realist,” the last of the Essays, Second Series :

I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers: I endeavored to show my good men that I liked everything by turns and nothing long…. Could they but once understand, that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them Godspeed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, it would be a great satisfaction (CW 3:145).

The self-reliant person will “publish” her results, but she must first learn to detect that spark of originality or genius that is her particular gift to the world. It is not a gift that is available on demand, however, and a major task of life is to meld genius with its expression. “The man,” Emerson states “is only half himself, the other half is his expression” (CW 3:4). There are young people of genius, Emerson laments in “Experience,” who promise “a new world” but never deliver: they fail to find the focus for their genius “within the actual horizon of human life” (CW 3:31). Although Emerson emphasizes our independence and even distance from one another, then, the payoff for self-reliance is public and social. The scholar finds that the most private and secret of his thoughts turn out to be “the most acceptable, most public, and universally true” (CW1: 63). And the great “representative men” Emerson identifies are marked by their influence on the world. Their names-Plato, Moses, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, even Napoleon-are “ploughed into the history of this world” (CW1: 80).

Although self-reliance is central, it is not the only Emersonian virtue. Emerson also praises a kind of trust, and the practice of a “wise skepticism.” There are times, he holds, when we must let go and trust to the nature of the universe: “As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world” (CW3:16). But the world of flux and conflicting evidence also requires a kind of epistemological and practical flexibility that Emerson calls “wise skepticism” (CW4: 89). His representative skeptic of this sort is Michel de Montaigne, who as portrayed in Representative Men is no unbeliever, but a man with a strong sense of self, rooted in the earth and common life, whose quest is for knowledge. He wants “a near view of the best game and the chief players; what is best in the planet; art and nature, places and events; but mainly men” (CW4: 91). Yet he knows that life is perilous and uncertain, “a storm of many elements,” the navigation through which requires a flexible ship, “fit to the form of man.” (CW4: 91).

The son of a Unitarian minister, Emerson attended Harvard Divinity School and was employed as a minister for almost three years. Yet he offers a deeply felt and deeply reaching critique of Christianity in the “Divinity School Address,” flowing from a line of argument he establishes in “The American Scholar.” If the one thing in the world of value is the active soul, then religious institutions, no less than educational institutions, must be judged by that standard. Emerson finds that contemporary Christianity deadens rather than activates the spirit. It is an “Eastern monarchy of a Christianity” in which Jesus, originally the “friend of man,” is made the enemy and oppressor of man. A Christianity true to the life and teachings of Jesus should inspire “the religious sentiment” — a joyous seeing that is more likely to be found in “the pastures,” or “a boat in the pond” than in a church. Although Emerson thinks it is a calamity for a nation to suffer the “loss of worship” (CW1: 89) he finds it strange that, given the “famine of our churches” (CW1: 85) anyone should attend them. He therefore calls on the Divinity School graduates to breathe new life into the old forms of their religion, to be friends and exemplars to their parishioners, and to remember “that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles” (CW1: 90).

Power is a theme in Emerson’s early writing, but it becomes especially prominent in such middle- and late-career essays as “Experience,” “Montaigne, or the Skeptic” “Napoleon,” and “Power.” Power is related to action in “The American Scholar,” where Emerson holds that a “true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power” (CW1: 59). It is also a subject of “Self-Reliance,” where Emerson writes of each person that “the power which resides in him is new in nature” (CW2: 28). In “Experience” Emerson speaks of a life which “is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy” (CW3: 294); and in “Power” he celebrates the “bruisers” (CW6: 34) of the world who express themselves rudely and get their way. The power in which Emerson is interested, however, is more artistic and intellectual than political or military. In a characteristic passage from “Power,” he states:

In history the great moment, is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty:-and you have Pericles and Phidias,-not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity. (CW6: 37–8)

Power is all around us, but it cannot always be controlled. It is like “a bird which alights nowhere,” hopping “perpetually from bough to bough” (CW3: 34). Moreover, we often cannot tell at the time when we exercise our power that we are doing so: happily we sometimes find that much is accomplished in “times when we thought ourselves indolent” (CW3: 28).

At some point in many of his essays and addresses, Emerson enunciates, or at least refers to, a great vision of unity. He speaks in “The American Scholar” of an “original unit” or “fountain of power” (CW1: 53), of which each of us is a part. He writes in “The Divinity School Address” that each of us is “an inlet into the deeps of Reason.” And in “Self-Reliance,” the essay that more than any other celebrates individuality, he writes of “the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE” (CW2: 40). “The Oversoul” is Emerson’s most sustained discussion of “the ONE,” but he does not, even there, shy away from the seeming conflict between the reality of process and the reality of an ultimate metaphysical unity. How can the vision of succession and the vision of unity be reconciled?

Emerson never comes to a clear or final answer. One solution he both suggests and rejects is an unambiguous idealism, according to which a nontemporal “One” or “Oversoul” is the only reality, and all else is illusion. He suggests this, for example, in the many places where he speaks of waking up out of our dreams or nightmares. But he then portrays that to which we awake not simply as an unchanging “ONE,” but as a process or succession: a “growth” or “movement of the soul” (CW2: 189); or a “new yet unapproachable America” (CW3: 259).

Emerson undercuts his visions of unity (as of everything else) through what Stanley Cavell calls his “epistemology of moods.” According to this epistemology, most fully developed in “Experience” but present in all of Emerson’s writing, we never apprehend anything “straight” or in-itself, but only under an aspect or mood. Emerson writes that life is “a train of moods like a string of beads,” through which we see only what lies in each bead’s focus (CW3: 30). The beads include our temperaments, our changing moods, and the “Lords of Life” which govern all human experience. The Lords include “Succession,” “Surface,” “Dream,” “Reality,” and “Surprise.” Are the great visions of unity, then, simply aspects under which we view the world?

Emerson’s most direct attempt to reconcile succession and unity, or the one and the many, occurs in the last essay in the Essays, Second Series , entitled “Nominalist and Realist.” There he speaks of the universe as an “old Two-face…of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied” (CW3: 144). As in “Experience,” Emerson leaves us with the whirling succession of moods. “I am always insincere,” he skeptically concludes, “as always knowing there are other moods” (CW3: 145). But Emerson enacts as well as describes the succession of moods, and he ends “Nominalist and Realist” with the “feeling that all is yet unsaid,” and with at least the idea of some universal truth (CW3: 363).

Massachusetts ended slavery in 1783, when Chief Justice William Cushing instructed the jury in the case of Quock Walker, a former slave, that “the idea of slavery” was “inconsistent” with the Massachusetts Constitution’ guarantee that “all men are born free and equal” (Gougeon, 71). Emerson first encountered slavery when he went south for his health in the winter of 1827, when he was 23. He recorded the following scene in his journal from his time in Tallahasse, Florida:

A fortnight since I attended a meeting of the Bible Society. The Treasurer of this institution is Marshal of the district & by a somewhat unfortunate arrangement had appointed a special meeting of the Society & a Slave Auction at the same time & place, one being in the Government house & the other in the adjoining yard. One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy whilst the other was regaled with “Going gentlemen, Going!” And almost without changing our position we might aid in sending the scriptures into Africa or bid for “four children without the mother who had been kidnapped therefrom” (JMN3: 117).

Emerson never questioned the iniquity of slavery, though it was not a main item on his intellectual agenda until the eighteen forties. He refers to abolition in the “Prospects” chapter of Nature when he speaks of the “gleams of a better light” in the darkness of history and gives as examples “the abolition of the Slave-trade,” “the history of Jesus Christ,” and “the wisdom of children” (CW1:43). He condemns slavery in some of his greatest essays, “Self-Reliance” (1841), so that even if we didn’t have the anti-slavery addresses of the 1840s and 1850s, we would still have evidence both of the existence of slavery and of Emerson’s opposition to it. He praises “the bountiful cause of Abolition,” although he laments that the cause had been taken over by “angry bigots.” Later in the essay he treats abolition as one of the great causes and movements of world history, along with Christianity, the Reformation, and Methodism. In a well-known statement he writes that an “institution is the shadow of one man,” giving as examples “the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition of Clarkson” (CW2: 35). The unfamiliar name in this list is that of Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), a Cambridge-educated clergyman who helped found the British Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Clarkson travelled on horseback throughout Britain, interviewing sailors who worked on slaving ships, and exhibiting such tools as manacles, thumbscews, branding irons, and other tools of the trade. His History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) would be a major source for Emerson’s anti-slavery addresses.

Slavery also appears in “Politics,” from the Essays, Second Series of 1844, when Emerson surveys the two main American parties. One, standing for free trade, wide suffrage, and the access of the young and poor to wealth and power, has the “best cause” but the least attractive leaders; while the other has the most cultivated and able leaders, but is “merely defensive of property.” This conservative party, moreover, “vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant” (CW3: 124). Emerson stands here for emancipation, not simply for the ending of the slave trade.

1844 was also the year of Emerson’s breakout anti-slavery address, which he gave at the annual celebration of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. In the background was the American war with Mexico, the annexation of Texas, and the likelihood that it would be entering the Union as a slave state. Although Concord was a hotbed of abolitionism compared to Boston, there were many conservatives in the town. No church allowed Emerson to speak on the subject, and when the courthouse was secured for the talk, the sexton refused to ring the church bell to announce it, a task the young Henry David Thoreau took upon himself to perform (Gougeon, 75). In his address, Emerson develops a critique of the language we use to speak about, or to avoid speaking about, black slavery:

Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, as they are producers of corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of sugar, of rum, and brandy, gentle and joyous themselves, and producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world.… I am heart-sick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers ( Emerson’s Antislavery Writings , 9).

Emerson’s long address is both clear-eyed about the evils of slavery and hopeful about the possibilities of the Africans. Speaking with the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass beside him on the dais, Emerson states: “The black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization.” He praises “such men as” Toussaint [L]Ouverture, leader of the Haitian slave rebellion, and announces: “here is the anti-slave: here is man; and if you have man, black or white is an insignificance.” (Wirzrbicki, 95; Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, 31).

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 effectively nationalized slavery, requiring officials and citizens of the free states to assist in returning escaped slaves to their owners. Emerson’s 1851 “Address to the Citizens of Concord” calls both for the abrogation of the law and for disobeying it while it is still current. In 1854, the escaped slave Anthony Burns was shipped back to Virginia by order of the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, an order carried out by U. S. Marines, in accordance with the new law. This example of “Slavery in Massachusetts” (as Henry Thoreau put it in a well-known address) is in the background of Emerson’s 1855 “Lecture on Slavery,” where he calls the recognition of slavery by the original 1787 Constitution a “crime.” Emerson gave these and other antislavery addresses multiple times in various places from the late 1840s till the beginning of the Civil War. On the eve of the war Emerson supported John Brown, the violent abolitionist who was executed in 1859 by the U. S. government after he attacked the U. S. armory in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. In the middle of the War, Emerson raised funds for black regiments of Union soldiers (Wirzbicki, 251–2) and read his “Boston Hymn” to an audience of 3000 celebrating President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. “Pay ransom to the owner,” Emerson wrote, “and fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is owner. And ever was. Pay him” (CW9: 383).

Emerson’s magisterial essay “Fate,” published in The Conduct of Life (1860) is distinguished not only by its attempt to reconcile freedom and necessity, but by disturbing pronouncements about fate and race, for example:

The population of the world is a conditional population, not the best, but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain.… The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie (CW6: 8–9).

The references to race here show the influence of a new “scientific” interest in both England and America in the role that race—often conflated with culture or nation—plays in human evolution. In America, this interest was entangled with the institution of slavery, the encounters with Native American tribes, and with the notion of “Anglo-Saxon liberties” that came to prominence during the American Revolution, and developed into the idea that there was an Anglo-Saxon race (see Horsman).

Emerson would not be Emerson, however, if he did not conduct a critique of his terms, and “race” is a case in point. He takes it up in a non-American context, however: in the essay “Race” from English Traits (1856). Emerson’s critique of his title begins in the essay’s first paragraph when he writes that “each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends.” Civilization “eats away the old traits,” he continues, and religions construct new forms of character that cut against old racial divisions. More deeply still, he identifies considerations that “threaten to undermine” the concept of race. The “fixity … of races as we see them,” he writes, “is a weak argument for the eternity of these frail boundaries, since all our historical period is a point” in the long duration of nature (CW 5:24). The patterns we see today aren’t pure anyway:

though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races, all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of races, and strange resemblances meet us every where, It need not puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt and Roman, Saxon and Tartar should mix, when we see the rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human form, and know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but that some spray sprinkles us from the antidiluvian seas.

As in Nature and his great early works, Emerson asserts our intimate relations with the natural world, from the oceans to the animals. Why, one might think, should one of the higher but still initial forms be singled out for separation, abasement, and slavery? Emerson works out his views in “Race” without referring to American slavery, however, in a book about England where he sees a healthy mixture, not a pure race. England’s history, he writes, is not so much “one of certain tribes of Saxons, Jutes, or Frisians, coming from one place, and genetically identical, as it is an anthology of temperaments out of them all.… The English derive their pedigree from such a range of nationalities.… The Scandinavians in her race still hear in every age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean; the Briton in the blood hugs the homestead still” (CW5: 28). Still, it is striking that Emerson never mentions slavery in either “Fate” or “Race,” both of which were written during his intense period of public opposition to American slavery.

4. Some Questions about Emerson

Emerson routinely invites charges of inconsistency. He says the world is fundamentally a process and fundamentally a unity; that it resists the imposition of our will and that it flows with the power of our imagination; that travel is good for us, since it adds to our experience, and that it does us no good, since we wake up in the new place only to find the same “ sad self” we thought we had left behind (CW2: 46).

Emerson’s “epistemology of moods” is an attempt to construct a framework for encompassing what might otherwise seem contradictory outlooks, viewpoints, or doctrines. Emerson really means to “accept,” as he puts it, “the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies” (CW3: 36). He means to be irresponsible to all that holds him back from his self-development. That is why, at the end of “Circles,” he writes that he is “only an experimenter…with no Past at my back” (CW2: 188). In the world of flux that he depicts in that essay, there is nothing stable to be responsible to: “every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten, the coming only is sacred” (CW2: 189).

Despite this claim, there is considerable consistency in Emerson’s essays and among his ideas. To take just one example, the idea of the “active soul” – mentioned as the “one thing in the world, of value” in ‘The American Scholar’ – is a presupposition of Emerson’s attack on “the famine of the churches” (for not feeding or activating the souls of those who attend them); it is an element in his understanding of a poem as “a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own …” (CW3: 6); and, of course, it is at the center of Emerson’s idea of self-reliance. There are in fact multiple paths of coherence through Emerson’s philosophy, guided by ideas discussed previously: process, education, self-reliance, and the present.

It is hard for an attentive reader not to feel that there are important differences between early and late Emerson: for example, between the buoyant Nature (1836) and the weary ending of “Experience” (1844); between the expansive author of “Self-Reliance” (1841) and the burdened writer of “Fate” (1860). Emerson himself seems to advert to such differences when he writes in “Fate”: “Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn that negative power, or circumstance, is half” (CW6: 8). Is “Fate” the record of a lesson Emerson had not absorbed in his early writing, concerning the multiple ways in which circumstances over which we have no control — plagues, hurricanes, temperament, sexuality, old age — constrain self-reliance or self-development?

“Experience” is a key transitional essay. “Where do we find ourselves?” is the question with which it begins. The answer is not a happy one, for Emerson finds that we occupy a place of dislocation and obscurity, where “sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree” (CW3: 27). An event hovering over the essay, but not disclosed until its third paragraph, is the death of his five-year old son Waldo. Emerson finds in this episode and his reaction to it an example of an “unhandsome” general character of existence-it is forever slipping away from us, like his little boy.

“Experience” presents many moods. It has its moments of illumination, and its considered judgment that there is an “Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam” (CW3: 41). It offers wise counsel about “skating over the surfaces of life” and confining our existence to the “mid-world.” But even its upbeat ending takes place in a setting of substantial “defeat.” “Up again, old heart!” a somewhat battered voice states in the last sentence of the essay. Yet the essay ends with an assertion that in its great hope and underlying confidence chimes with some of the more expansive passages in Emerson’s writing. The “true romance which the world exists to realize,” he states, “will be the transformation of genius into practical power” (CW3: 49).

Despite important differences in tone and emphasis, Emerson’s assessment of our condition remains much the same throughout his writing. There are no more dire indictments of ordinary human life than in the early work, “The American Scholar,” where Emerson states that “Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are spawn, and are called ‘the mass’ and ‘the herd.’ In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every man” (CW1: 65). Conversely, there is no more idealistic statement in his early work than the statement in “Fate” that “[t]hought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic” (CW6: 15). All in all, the earlier work expresses a sunnier hope for human possibilities, the sense that Emerson and his contemporaries were poised for a great step forward and upward; and the later work, still hopeful and assured, operates under a weight or burden, a stronger sense of the dumb resistance of the world.

Emerson read widely, and gave credit in his essays to the scores of writers from whom he learned. He kept lists of literary, philosophical, and religious thinkers in his journals and worked at categorizing them.

Among the most important writers for the shape of Emerson’s philosophy are Plato and the Neoplatonist line extending through Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus, and the Cambridge Platonists. Equally important are writers in the Kantian and Romantic traditions (which Emerson probably learned most about from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria ). Emerson read avidly in Indian, especially Hindu, philosophy, and in Confucianism. There are also multiple empiricist, or experience-based influences, flowing from Berkeley, Wordsworth and other English Romantics, Newton’s physics, and the new sciences of geology and comparative anatomy. Other writers whom Emerson often mentions are Anaxagoras, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Jacob Behmen, Cicero, Goethe, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Mencius, Pythagoras, Schiller, Thoreau, August and Friedrich Schlegel, Shakespeare, Socrates, Madame de Staël and Emanuel Swedenborg.

Emerson’s works were well known throughout the United States and Europe in his day. Nietzsche read German translations of Emerson’s essays, copied passages from “History” and “Self-Reliance” in his journals, and wrote of the Essays : that he had never “felt so much at home in a book.” Emerson’s ideas about “strong, overflowing” heroes, friendship as a battle, education, and relinquishing control in order to gain it, can be traced in Nietzsche’s writings. Other Emersonian ideas-about transition, the ideal in the commonplace, and the power of human will permeate the writings of such classical American pragmatists as William James and John Dewey.

Stanley Cavell’s engagement with Emerson is the most original and prolonged by any philosopher, and Emerson is a primary source for his writing on “moral perfectionism.” In his earliest essays on Emerson, such as “Thinking of Emerson” and “Emerson, Coleridge, Kant,” Cavell considers Emerson’s place in the Kantian tradition, and he explores the affinity between Emerson’s call in “The American Scholar” for a return to “the common and the low” and Wittgenstein’s quest for a return to ordinary language. In “Being Odd, Getting Even” and “Aversive Thinking,” Cavell considers Emerson’s anticipations of existentialism, and in these and other works he explores Emerson’s affinities with Nietzsche and Heidegger.

In Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome and Cities of Words , Cavell develops what he calls “Emersonian moral perfectionism,” of which he finds an exemplary expression in Emerson’s “History”: “So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.” Emersonian perfectionism is oriented towards a wiser or better self that is never final, always initial, always on the way.

Cavell does not have a neat and tidy definition of perfectionism, and his list of perfectionist works ranges from Plato’s Republic to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations , but he identifies “two dominating themes of perfectionism” in Emerson’s writing: (1) “that the human self … is always becoming, as on a journey, always partially in a further state. This journey is described as education or cultivation”; (2) “that the other to whom I can use the words I discover in which to express myself is the Friend—a figure that may occur as the goal of the journey but also as its instigation and accompaniment” ( Cities of Words , 26–7). The friend can be a person but it may also be a text. In the sentence from “History” cited above, the writing of the “Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist” about “the wise man” functions as a friend and guide, describing to each reader not just any idea, but “his own idea.” This is the text as instigator and companion.

Cavell’s engagement with perfectionism springs from a response to his colleague John Rawls, who in A Theory of Justice condemns Nietzsche (and implicitly Emerson) for his statement that “mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings.” “Perfectionism,” Rawls states, “is denied as a political principle.” Cavell replies that Emerson’s (and Nietzsche’s) focus on the great man has nothing to do with a transfer of economic resources or political power, or with the idea that “there is a separate class of great men …for whose good, and conception of good, the rest of society is to live” (CHU, 49). The great man or woman, Cavell holds, is required for rather than opposed to democracy: “essential to the criticism of democracy from within” (CHU, 3).

• [ CW ] The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Robert Spiller et al, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–
• [ E ] “Education,” in Lectures and Biographical Sketches , in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883, pp. 125–59
• The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 12 volumes, 1903–4
• The Annotated Emerson , ed. David Mikics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. 10 vols., Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910–14.
• The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. William Gillman, et al., Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1960–
• The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson , 3 vols, Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, eds., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–72.
• The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton. 10 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964–95.
• (with Thomas Carlyle), The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle , ed. Joseph Slater, New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.
• Emerson’s Antislavery Writings , eds. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995.
• The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson , eds. Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003.
• Emerson: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) , ed. Kenneth Sacks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• (See Chronology for original dates of publication.)
• Alcott, Amos Bronson, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Estimate of His Character and Genius: In Prose and in Verse , Boston: A. Williams and Co., 1882)
• Allen, Gay Wilson, 1981, Waldo Emerson , New York: Viking Press.
• Arsić, Branka, 2010. On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Arsić, Branka, and Carey Wolfe (eds.), 2010. The Other Emerson , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Bishop, Jonathan, 1964, Emerson on the Soul , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Buell, Lawrence, 2003, Emerson , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Cameron, Sharon, 2007, Impersonality , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Carpenter, Frederick Ives, 1930, Emerson and Asia , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Cavell, Stanley, 1981, “Thinking of Emerson” and “An Emerson Mood,” in The Senses of Walden, An Expanded Edition , San Francisco: North Point Press.
• –––, 1988, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1990, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Abbreviated CHU in the text.).
• –––, 2004, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes , Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• –––, 2004, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life , Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Conant, James, 1997, “Emerson as Educator,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , 43: 181–206.
• –––, 2001, “Nietzsche as Educator,” Nietzsche’s Post-Moralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future , Richard Schacht (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 181–257.
• Constantinesco, Thomas, 2012, Ralph Waldo Emerson: L’Amérique à l’essai , Paris: Editions Rue d’Ulm.
• Ellison, Julie, 1984, Emerson’s Romantic Style , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Firkins, Oscar W., 1915, Ralph Waldo Emerson , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Follett, Danielle, 2015, “The Tension Between Immanence and Dualism in Coleridge and Emerson,” in Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature , Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Thomas Constantinesco (eds.), London: Routledge, 209–221.
• Friedl, Herwig, 2018, Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition , New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• Goodman, Russell B., 1990a, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chapter 2.
• –––, 1990b, “East-West Philosophy in Nineteenth Century America: Emerson and Hinduism,” Journal of the History of Ideas , 51(4): 625–45.
• –––, 1997, “Moral Perfectionism and Democracy in Emerson and Nietzsche,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance , 43: 159–80.
• –––, 2004, “The Colors of the Spirit: Emerson and Thoreau on Nature and the Self,” Nature in American Philosophy , Jean De Groot (ed.), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1–18.
• –––, 2008, “Emerson, Romanticism, and Classical American Pragmatism,” The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy , Cheryl Misak (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19–37.
• –––, 2015, American Philosophy Before Pragmatism , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 147–99, 234–54.
• –––, 2021, “Transcendentalist Legacies in American Philosophy,” Handbook of American Romanticism, Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr, Jan Stievermann (ed.), Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 517–536.
• Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1885, Ralph Waldo Emerson , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Horsman, Reginald, 1981, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Cambridge, and London: Harvard University Press.
• Lysaker, John, 2008, Emerson and Self-Culture , Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
• Matthiessen, F. O., 1941, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Packer, B. L., 1982, Emerson’s Fall , New York: Continuum.
• –––, 2007, The Transcendentalists , Athens: University of Georgia Press.
• Poirier, Richard, 1987, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections , New York: Random House.
• –––, 1992, Poetry and Pragmatism , Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
• Porte, Joel, and Morris, Saundra (eds.), 1999, The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Richardson, Robert D. Jr., 1995, Emerson: The Mind on Fire , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Sacks, Kenneth, 2003, Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Urbas, Joseph, 2016, Emerson’s Metaphysics: A Song of Laws and Causes , Lanham, MD and London: Lexington Books.
• –––, 2021, The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson , New York and London: Routledge.
• Versluis, Arthur, 1993, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Whicher, Stephen, 1953, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Wirzbicki, Peter, 2021, Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery , Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Zavatta, Benedetta, 2019, Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson, trans. Alexander Reynolds , New York: Oxford University Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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10 of the Best Ralph Waldo Emerson Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In his vast Guide to Modern World Literature , Martin Seymour-Smith calls Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman the only true poetic innovators in nineteenth-century American poetry. But in fact, Dickinson’s eccentric use of slant rhyme and Whitman’s development of free verse are both anticipated in the work of an earlier nineteenth-century American poet: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson (1803-82) is best-known for his prose writings: his 1836 pamphlet ‘ Nature ’ became a kind of unofficial manifesto for the Transcendentalist movement in New England. This was, in many ways, America’s development of European Romanticism, in that it argued for the kinship between the natural world and the human imagination.

Emerson’s prose essays often eclipse his poetic achievement. His poetry, which appeared in Poems (1847) and May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), is uneven in quality, but at its best it is lively, arresting, and genuinely innovative. Let’s take a look at ten of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s best poems.

1. ‘ Boston Hymn ’.

The word of the Lord by night To the watching Pilgrims came, As they sat by the seaside, And filled their hearts with flame.

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.

One of two very famous public hymns Emerson is principally known for (even by people who don’t usually read his poetry), ‘Boston Hymn’ was composed in 1862 and read publicly in Boston Music Hall on 1 January 1863.

The poem commemorates the Emancipation Proclamation issued by the US President Abraham Lincoln. Emerson lived in Boston, and the city was known for its support for the abolitionist movement; this hymn celebrates the freeing of the slaves which the proclamation brought into being.

2. ‘ The Snow-Storm ’.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.

Transcendentalists, like the Romantics whom they followed and learnt so much from, often write about nature in all its power and beauty; and this is one of Emerson’s finest nature poems.

Indeed, the poem might be regarded as an example of the Sublime: that philosophy which views nature as both beautiful and terrifying, and far greater, more long-lasting, and more powerful than mankind. In lines of blank verse – the unrhymed structure perhaps suggesting the wild unpredictability of the snow falling – Emerson vividly captures the ‘frolic architecture of the snow’.

3. ‘ Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing ’.

Though loath to grieve The evil time’s sole patriot, I cannot leave My honied thought For the priest’s cant, Or statesman’s rant.

As the full title of this poem makes clear, it was dedicated to William Henry Channing (1810-84), a minister and reformer for the abolition of slavery. The poem is one of Emerson’s most deeply allusive, and one needs a fairly good knowledge of American history to make sense of its various references; but the lively short lines show Emerson’s distinctive and original approach to form.

4. ‘ The Rhodora ’.

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

This 1834 poem is another one of Emerson’s nature poems, describing the flowering shrub, the rhodora, in the woods. Emerson praises this shrub as a ‘rival of the rose’ for its beauty. The last line is Romantic Transcendentalism through and through, uniting the poet’s fate with that of the flower.

5. ‘ Merlin ’.

Pass in, pass in, the angels say, In to the upper doors; Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to Paradise By the stairway of surprise.

In this longer poem of 1847, Emerson tried to find a new direction for American poetry, much as he had tried to do in his 1843 essay ‘ The Poet ’. To do this, Emerson rejects the traditional forms and models which earlier American poets had inherited from England and Europe.

The Merlin of Emerson’s poem is a seer, a prophetic figure: exactly the kind of person Emerson thought the poet should be. The image of the ‘stairway of surprise’, quoted above, has often been praised by critics.

6. ‘ Brahma ’.

If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again.

This poem, written in 1856, was first published in The Atlantic the following year. The poem is named after Brahman, the universal principle of the Vedas in Hinduism. It’s a dramatic work (of sorts), spoken by Brahma himself, and reveals Emerson’s interest in Eastern scriptures and spiritual thought.

7. ‘ The Bell ’.

I love thy music, mellow bell, I love thine iron chime, To life or death, to heaven or hell, Which calls the sons of Time.

Written in more traditional quatrains using alternate abab rhyme, ‘The Bell’ shows that Emerson was capable of more conventional formal lyrics as well as his freer, looser poems.

8. ‘ Ode to Beauty ’.

Who gave thee, O Beauty, The keys of this breast,— Too credulous lover Of blest and unblest? Say, when in lapsed ages Thee knew I of old; Or what was the service For which I was sold?

Here’s another of Emerson’s odes, this time in praise of ‘Beauty’, whom Emerson personifies and addresses directly. For Emerson, Beauty is ‘Queen of things’ whom he entreats to give herself to him, or else let him die – for a life lived without beauty is not worth living.

9. ‘ Terminus ’.

It is time to be old, To take in sail:— The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: ‘No more! No farther shoot Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root …

The Latin word ‘terminus’ means ‘end’, and this later poem, published when Emerson was in his sixties, shows him reflecting on old age and what Philip Larkin called ‘the only end of age’, death. Terminus, in Emerson’s poem, is personified, as a figure not unlike Old Father Time, reminding us that Terminus was a Roman god of boundaries and endings.

10. ‘ Concord Hymn ’.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Let’s conclude this pick of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s best poems with his best-known of all. ‘Concord Hymn’ is a ‘poem of occasion’, written in 1837 in order to be sung at the unveiling of a monument commemorating the battles of Lexington and Concord. Emerson was unable to attend the unveiling himself, but Henry David Thoreau was there to sing the hymn along with others in attendance.

One line from this public poem (and a very formally regular poem, by Emerson’s standards) has become universally known: ‘the shot heard around the world.’ Emerson’s poem commemorates those Americans who resisted British rule, starting with the War of Independence in the previous century and moving up to date.

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The Beauty About The Nature

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The Stars Awaken a Certain Reverence, Because Though Always Present, They Are Inaccessible;

but all natural objects make a kindred impression when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood. When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet . The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet . This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this, their warranty deeds give no title. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other;

who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.

Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare 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. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith.

There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,

— no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. 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 eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.

I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

Chapter I from Nature , published as part of Nature; Addresses and Lectures

What Is The Meaning Behind Nature, The Poem?

Emerson often referred to nature as the "Universal Being" in his many lectures. It was Emerson who deeply believed there was a spiritual sense of the natural world which felt was all around him.

Going deeper still in this discussion of the "Universal Being", Emerson writes, "The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship."

It's common sense that "nature" is everything you see that is NOT man-made, or changed by man (trees, foliage, mountains, etc.), but Emerson reminds us that nature was set forth to serve man. This is the essence of human will, for man to harness nature. Every object in nature has its own beauty. Therefore, Emerson advocates to view nature as a reality by building your own world and surrounding yourself with natural beauty.

• The purpose of science is to find the theory of nature.
• Nature wears the colors of the Spirit.
• A man is fed, not to fill his belly, but so he may work.
• Each natural action is graceful.

"Material objects are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side."

This quote is cited in numerous works and it is attributed to a "French philosopher." However, no name can be found in association with this quote.

What is the main point of Nature, by Emerson?

The central theme of Emerson's famous essay "Nature" is the harmony that exists between the natural world and human beings. In "Nature," Ralph Waldo Emerson contends that man should rid himself of material cares and instead of being burdened by unneeded stress, he can enjoy an original relation with the universe and experience what Emerson calls "the sublime."

What is the central idea of the essay Nature, by Emerson?

For Emerson, nature is not literally God but the body of God’s soul. ”Nature,” he writes, is “mind precipitated.” Emerson feels that to realize one’s role in this respect fully is to be in paradise (similar to heaven itself).

What is Emerson's view of the Nature of humans?

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The prosperous and beautiful      To me seem not to wear  The yoke of conscience masterful,      Which galls me everywhere. 

I cannot shake off the god;     On my neck me makes his seat; I look at my face in the glass, ——     My eyes his eyeballs meet. 

Enchanters! enchantresses!      Your gold makes you seem wise; The morning mist within your grounds     More proudly rolls, more softly lies. 

Yet spake yon purple mountain,      Yet said yon ancient wood, That Night or Day, that Love or Crime,      Leads all souls to the Good. 

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 21, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

More by this poet

Song of nature.

Mine are the night and morning, The pits of air, the gulf of space, The sportive sun, the gibbous moon, The innumerable days.

I hid in the solar glory, I am dumb in the pealing song, I rest on the pitch of the torrent, In slumber I am strong.

Daughter of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring, With sudden passion languishing, Teaching Barren moors to smile, Painting pictures mile on mile, Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths, Whence a smokeless incense breathes. The air is full of whistlings bland; What was that I heard Out of the hazy land?

The Humble-Bee

Burly dozing humblebee! Where thou art is clime for me. Let them sail for Porto Rique, Far-off heats through seas to seek, I will follow thee alone, Thou animated torrid zone! Zig-zag steerer, desert-cheerer, Let me chase thy waving lines, Keep me nearer, me thy hearer,

I saw the civil sun drying earth’s tears — Her tears of joy that only faster flowed,

Fain would I stretch me by the highway side, To thaw and trickle with the melting snow, That mingled soul and body with the tide, I too may through the pores of nature flow.

But I alas nor tinkle can nor fume, One jot to forward the great work of Time, ‘Tis mine to hearken while these ply the loom, So shall my silence with their music chime.

Patience Taught by Nature

“O Dreary life!” we cry, “O dreary life!” And still the generations of the birds Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds Serenely live while we are keeping strife With Heaven’s true purpose in us, as a knife Against which we may struggle. Ocean girds Unslackened the dry land: savannah-swards Unweary sweep: hills watch, unworn; and rife Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest-trees, To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass In their old glory. O thou God of old!

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