Authors
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
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The outstanding achievement in Emerson scholarship is the edition of Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 16 vols. (1960–82), edited by William H. Gilman, et al.; for a onevolume introduction to the journals, see Joel Porte’s Emerson in His Journals (1982). Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams edited The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3 vols. (1959–72). Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson edited The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843– 1871 (2001). Ralph H. Orth is editor in chief of The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3 vols. (1990). The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1989) are available in four volumes, under the chief editorship of Albert J. von Frank. Merton M. Sealts Jr. and Alfred R. Ferguson edited “Nature”: Origin, Growth, Meaning (1969), of which Sealts prepared a revision (1979). Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton’s ten-volume Letters (1939, 1990–95) is supplemented by The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (1964), edited by Joseph Slater. A useful one-volume introduction to the letters is Joel Myerson’s Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1997). Eric W. Carlson edited Emerson’s Literary Criticism (1979); Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson edited Emerson’s Antislavery Writings (1995). The most detailed biography is still Ralph L. Rusk’s The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1949), but see also Gay Wilson Allen’s Waldo Emerson (1981) and especially Robert D. Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995). Phyllis Cole’s Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (1998) explores the crucial influence of Emerson’s aunt on his life and thought. Albert J. von Frank compiled An Emerson Chronology (1993). Joel Myerson edited Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews (1992) and prepared Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography (1982). The best recent guide is Burkholder’s Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1980–1991 (1994). Important collections of criticism are Emerson Centenary Essays (1982), edited by Joel Myerson; Critical Essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983), edited by Robert E. Burkholder and Myerson; Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays (1993), edited by Lawrence Buell; Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson (1997), edited by Wesley T. Mott and Robert E. Burkholder; A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1999), edited by Myerson; and Emerson Bicentennial Essays (2006), edited by Ronald A. Bosco and Myerson. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris edited both the Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1999) and the Norton Critical Edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Prose and Poetry (2001). Important recent critical studies include Len Gougeon’s Virtue’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (1990), Christopher Newfield’s The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (1996), Eduardo Cadava’s Emerson and the Climates of History (1997), Pamela Schirmeister’s Less Tangible Meanings: Between Poetry and Philosophy in the Work of Emerson (2000), Lawrence Buell’s Emerson (2003), Kris Fresonke’s West of Emerson: The Design of Manifest Destiny (2003), and Joel Porte’s Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed (2004).
The central figure in a group of nineteenth-century Boston thinkers known as the Transcendentalists, Emerson was the son of a Unitarian minister who died when Emerson was eight years old. His mother ran boardinghouses to put her sons through school: Emerson graduated from Harvard in 1821, and then, after studying theology, he was ordained a pastor in 1829. Though he enjoyed delivering sermons, Emerson's faith in Christianity began to waver as he came under the influence of German philosophers and the British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge; after he lost belief in the rites of the Last Supper, he resigned from his church in 1831. His wife, Ellen Tucker, died tragically young from tuberculosis, leaving Emerson a legacy that allowed him to spend the rest of his life traveling, lecturing, and writing. Nature (1836), a major contribution to American Romanticism and Transcendentalism, appeared anonymously and was favorably received among his friends. Not until the publication of Essays (1841) was Emerson confirmed as a dominant presence in American letters. To this day, his influence on American writers, from Dreiser to Frost to Stevens to Ammons and on, is undeniable.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Originally an address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837,
The American Scholar was a radical document in its time, a blow against an educational system that favored rote learning, declamation, and a prescribed curriculum for all undergraduates. Later in the century, an American educational revolution brought concentration choices and elective courses to our college and universities. This reform was inspired in great part by Emerson's pronouncements about scholarship, about the idea of an education, and about the nature of thinking itself. If Emerson's Nature bewilders you with its abstractions and bold connections, The American Scholar can help, as in this essay we see Emerson's views applied to a specific social institution, the American college.
1. Consider first Emerson's idea of a paragraph. Turn to The American Scholar and read the short paragraph that begins "In this distribution of function, the scholar is the delegated intellect" and the two paragraphs immediately following. Recall the exercise of looking for a "topic sentence" or a "thesis statement" in a well-constructed paragraph. What would you say is the topic sentence in each of these three by Emerson? Do these paragraphs develop according to conventions you learned in writing courses? What sorts of evidence do they muster to develop key ideas? How would you describe the way that Emerson seeks to convince you?
2. Look through The American Scholar and choose four sentences which, if taken out of context, could strike a reader as outlandish. How can we explain their inclusion in this essay? What is their effect? When Emerson declares that books "are for nothing but to inspire," does he mean precisely that? How are we to respond? Is a sentence like this to be taken at face value? Is it intended as an insurrection against another way of reading books?
3. When Emerson delivered this address, the systematic study of the natural, physical, and social sciences was only beginning at British and American universities. Engineering, psychology, organic chemistry, economics--these were virtually unknown as subjects for formal study on campuses. Do modern college curricula reflect Emerson's thinking in significant ways? Has Emerson been left behind by the educational revolution which he helped to begin? Which principles voiced in The American Scholar figure in your thinking about this question?
