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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Emerson's place in our poetic tradition is granted to be central, despite the elusive and variable style of his poetry. Because he was an avowed experimenter, the development of Emerson's style must be traced quite apart from the Emersonian ideas sometimes offered as his complete poetic stance. Throughout, his poetry can be called meditative in aim, and is based on a question-and-answer form dramatized as an encounter between the poet and Nature; the prototype is in the introduction to Nature (1836). There are three phases in his career: (1) poems of 1834 modeled after George Herbert and the art of neatness also visible in Nature; (2) the vision of wild, bardic freedom (1839-41), which led Emerson to a looser form and to the techniques of Anglo-Saxon poetry as they were understood by his contemporaries; (3) a wearing away of enthusiasm, spurred by Emerson's losses and growing skepticism in the 1840's. Then the techniques used to express bardic freedom take on a different color, no longer bold heavy strokes but witty, nimble leaps; in the central encounter Nature turns sly and contemptuous, refusing to answer questions directly, while the poet is passive, though serene and appreciative, in the face of a world much less knowable than in 1836. In. the third and major phase the poetry becomes compressed in both form and consciousness, a movement toward the “titmouse dimension.” And this style, more than his contribution to Whitman's bardism, is Emerson's legacy to modern American poets.
1 See Waggoner, American Poets (Boston: Houghton, 1968), p. xiii, and Fiedler, Waiting for the End (New York: Stein and Day, 1964), pp. 196–215.
2 Almost all critics of Emerson's poetry have alluded to disparities in his style. Edward Waldo Emerson, the Centenary editor, saw three phases: a juvenile imitation of the eighteenth century, a middle period when the poems were “roughly hammered out while hot,” and a later period when they were polished and more musical (Journals of RWE, ed. E. W. Emerson and Waldo E. Forbes, Boston and New York: Houghton, 1909–14, v, 226, n. 1; ix, 440, 486; hereafter cited as “J”). Thomas G. Henney, “The Craft of Genius: A Study of Emerson's Poetic Development 1823–1846,” Diss. Princeton 1946, divided the canon into two groups of early poems based on eighteenth-century techniques and the notion of metaphor as embellishment, and poems written after 1832 in which the metaphors are complex and strikingly original, p. viii, Chs. iii and iv. Carl F. Strauch, “A Critical and Variorum Edition of the
Poems of RWE,“ Diss. Yale 1946, found two groups of poems corresponding to two mutually contradictory theories of the imagination : poems of organic form where the imagination produces the whole poem at once (e.g., ”The Snow-Storm“), and poems directed by the symbolic imagination which issue in a string of symbols (e.g., ”The Problem“), pp. 149 ff. Stephen E. Whicher, Selections from AWE (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton, 1957), p. 408, divided the poems roughly into those that are regular and those that are free. Josephine Miles, RWE (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1964), pp. 35–36, saw Emerson's ”poetic allegiances divided“—to metaphysical succinctness on the one hand, and to freer, contemporary materials on the other. Waggoner, already quoted, seems to acknowledge these divisions by praising Emerson's versatility (pp. 109—12) and does not attempt to pin down Emerson's style in a book devoted to more general aims. Earlier criticism, much of it appreciative and impressionistic, can be traced in the dissertations of Henney and Strauch. Strauch has recently published ”‘The Minds’ Voice: Emerson's Poetic Styles,“ ESQ, No. 60 (Summer 1970), pp. 43–59, which bears interesting similarity to my own argument; in the light of this similarity I would like to point out that my essay was first submitted to PMLA in May 1969 and was accepted for publication in March 1970.
3 “Circles,” The Complete Works of RWE, ed. E. W. Emerson, Centenary Ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton, 1903–04), ii, 306–07, 318, hereafter cited in text. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of RWE, ed. William H. Gilman, Alfred R. Fergusson, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960- ), cited as “JMN”; The Early Lectures of RWE, ed. Stephen E. Wicher, Robert E. Spiller, Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959- ), cited as EL.
4 “Self-Reliance,” ii, 57. This is the crucial commentary on Emerson's more famous maxim about the “hobgoblins of little minds”; it shows that while he eschewed a superficial and merely logical consistency, he recognized a deeper consistency of “nature” or “character” which the mind does not consciously control. Cf. “Compensation,” II, 108.
5 See Stephen E. Wicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of RWE (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), Chs. v and vi. Jonathan Bishop, Emerson on the Soul (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), p. 205, puts the distinction succinctly: “Emerson the Romantic has become Emerson the Victorian.” Important studies which define or acknowledge this distinction are C. F. Strauch, “The Importance of Emerson's Skeptical Mood,” HLB, 11 (1957), 117–39, and “Emerson's Sacred Science,” PMLA, 73 (1958), 237–50; John Lydenberg, “Emerson and the Dark Tradition,” CritQ, 4 (1962), 352–58; H. H. Clark, “Conservative and Mediatory Emphases in Emerson's Thought,” Transcendentalism and Its Legacy, ed. Myron Simon and Thornton H. Parsons (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 25–62. My essay, “Emerson's Dialectic,” Criticism, 11 (Fall 1969), 313–28, attempts to illustrate the change in rhetorical structure of the essays that accompanied this change of viewpoint.
6 Fiedler, p. 212. Cf. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, N. J. : Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 156–57, who suggests that the poems go far toward dramatizing the transcendentalist's situation, the personal experience of trying to resolve the subjective-objective paradox.
7 See Norman A. Brittin, “Emerson and the Metaphysical Poets,” AL, 8 (March 1936), 1–21.
8 EL, i, 350. See also JMN, iii, 148, 284, 255, 321 for references to Herbert.
9 See C. F. Strauch, “The Year of Emerson's Poetic Maturity: 1834,” PQ, 34 (Oct. 1955), 353–77. Throughout I depend mainly on Strauch for dates, and on the notes in the Centenary Edition and the Selections edited by Whicher.
10 See J. C. Broderick, “The Date and Source of Emerson's ‘Grace,‘ ” MLN, 73 (Jan. 1958), 91–95; E. W. Emerson's note, ix, 510; and Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (London: G. Bell, 1913), p. 10, where Herbert's poem is quoted as a note to Aphorism xv. Whicher, Selections, p. 500, follows Strauch in dating the poem 1833.
11 Strauch, “A Critical and Variorum Edition,” p. 152, suggests Milton (Paradise Lost ii.621, 898, 948–50; v.772) as the source of the technique. Emerson quoted an example from Herrick in the 1835 lectures (EL, i, 346). George F. Whicher noted a striking parallel from Bradford, This Was a Poet (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1957), p 158.
12 Herbert's Country Parson: the passage and technique are discussed by Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, rev. ed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), p. 257.
13 Emerson quoted “The Elixir” in lecturing on Herbert (EL, i, 351–52), and Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested it as a source for “Art” (ix, 407). Similar images of servants or dwarfs transfigured occur in the poem “May-Day” (ix, 174–75) where the days are personified as travelers “deformed and low”; in “Voluntaries” (ix, 209); and in the conclusion of the essay “Spiritual Laws” (ii, 166). The personification of days in “May-Day” suggests that the more famous figures in “Days” (ix, 228), female and like the Moslem dervishes sworn to poverty, are linked to the crones and servants of the other poems. The genesis of that image is discussed by F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 59–60.
14 Again see Martz, pp. 267–68.
15 See Martz, pp. 1–39, and the discussion of Herbert, pp. 56–61, and in the later chapters where Martz shows bow Herbert qualifies and relaxes the more rigorous form of meditation, and how he departs from the practice of Donne. Emerson's meditative aim, but movement away from discipline and analysis, which I shall try to demonstrate, is in the same spirit as Herbert's. Martz argues for a direct link between the Jesuit formula and the method of the Meta-physicals, but he also suggests that the triadic formula is in general a “natural, fundamental tendency of the human mind” (p. 39); and he considers poets like Hopkins, Eliot, Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson as practicing the poetry of meditation (pp. 324–30).
16 See Walter Blair and Clarence Faust, “Emerson's Literary Method,” MP, 42 (1944), 79–95, for discussion of the ascending Platonic structure, based on the “twice-bisected line,” which might be applied to the divisions of Nature. Stephen Whicher regarded Nature as somewhat misguided in its effort toward consistency, and observed that its organization is “over-elaborate,” Freedom and Fate, p. 29; Selections, p. 13.
17 Cf. references in the journals to flux (J, v, 460, 480–81) and to Heraclitus (J, v, 436, 561), and also “Poetry and Imagination,” viii, 15, “The Poet,” iii, 34, and “Swedenborg,” iv, 117.
18 The symbolist proportions of Emerson's thought have been estimated by Charles Feidelson, Jr., in his classic study Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago : Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953). Gene Bluestein pursues much the same paths in “Emerson's Epiphanies,” NEQ, 39 (Dec. 1966), 447–60. The view that Emerson's poems are best treated as failed epiphanies and therefore poignantly human experience is advanced by Pearce (see n. 6 above) and also by Richard Lee Francis, “Archangel in the Pleached Garden: Emerson's Poetry,” ELH, 33 (Dec. 1966), 461–72, who compares Emerson's “Days” and “Brahma” to Frost singing of a “diminished thing.”
19 Of the many studies of their relationship, the most recent and most complete is Alvin Rosenfeld, “Emerson and Whitman: Their Personal and Literary Relationships,” Diss. Brown 1967. Rosenfeld demonstrates beyond question what others have suggested : Whitman's explicit debt to Emerson's ideas. But by limiting Emerson's concept of poetry to “The Poet” (pp. 183 If.), he overemphasizes that side of Emerson that proves his point; similarly, in saying that the rhyme and rhythm of both poets point toward free verse (pp. 199–207), he underplays the important differences.
20 A primary document for this shift is Emerson's manuscript poem “The Skeptic,” published and analyzed by Carl Strauch (see n. 5 above).
21 See passages written in the winter of 1842, J, vi, 152—53, 166, and another two years later (30 Jan. 1844), J, vi, 488.
22 Frederic I. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1930), Chs. v and vi, discusses the influence of Hindu and Persian sources on a number of poems, but primarily in terms of ideas rather than form. Carpenter says (p. 166) that, although Emerson classified Hafiz and Saadi as fatalists, he admired their expression of joy and lightness, qualities which suggest emancipation from the earlier rigorous fatalism of Mohammedanism. See also the more detailed study of J. D. Yohannan, “The Influence of Persian Poetry upon Emerson's Work,” AL, 15 (1943), 25–41, suggesting that the “cryptic and metrically crude expression” of Emerson's poetry influenced by the Persians is derived from his main source, the German versions by von Hammer-Purgstall; Nelson Adkins, “Emerson and the Bardic Tradition,” PMLA, 72 (1948), 662–67; and Kenneth W. Cameron, “The Potent Song in Emerson's Merlin Poems,” PQ, 32 (1953), 22–28.
23 (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1841), pp. 339, 341–43, 346 (Bk. ix, Ch. i). Emerson read earlier editions of Turner in 1822 and in 1835 (JMN, II, 77; v, 104–05).
24 Longfellow (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1845), p. 4. 26 Houghton MS. 126. Brackets indicate words crossed
out. These lines are published by permission of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association, literary executor of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and of the Harvard College Library.
26 The Dial 1840–1844 (New York: Russell, 1962), i, 220–21.
27 This point was overlooked by Blair and Faust (pp. 89–91), who used the poem as an example of the Platonic movement from sensuous to spiritual. George Arms, “The Dramatic Movement in Emerson's ‘Each and All,‘ ” ELN, 1 (March 1964), 207–09, stresses an opposite movement from didactic generalization to concrete experience.
28 See K. W. Cameron, “Early Background for Emerson's ‘The Problem,‘ ” ESQ, 27 (1962), 37–45, who makes this point.
29 See J, v, 431–33, 481, 485–86, 563–64, and an earlier attempt at fiction, JMN, i, 55, 266–68, 284–86, 302–03.
30 Selections, pp. xx-xxi.
31 “The Riddle of Emerson's ‘Sphinx,‘ ” AL, 27 (1955), 179–95.
32 Whitaker, p. 188.
33 Whicher, Freedom and Fate, p. 126, notes that “the habit of observer” is one of Emerson's answers to his dilemma.
34 Emerson lectured on natural science in the winter of 1833–34. See EL, i, 29–31.
35 “Saadi” was published in The Dial 1842, and according to E. W. Emerson's note (ix, 440–41), “Merlin” was completed in the summer of 1846. Henney (p. 108), following Carpenter, states that the personality of Hafiz-Saadi represented for Emerson “complete intellectual emancipation” (viii, 249). In the essay quoted (“Persian Poetry”) Emerson puts greatest stress on the contingency of life in the Orient (viii, 237–38); thus, it is their sense of fate, more perhaps than of freedom, that attracted Emerson to the Persians.
36 See also the quatrains collected by Stephen Whicher, Selections, pp. 466–77, and his comparison between the Merlin of “Considerations by the Way” (p. 464) and the earlier bardic Merlin, in the note on p. 509.
37 I have treated these two poems as extensions of the question-and-answer form in “Emerson's Poetry: A Study of Form and Techniques,” Diss. Pennsylvania 1967, pp. 197–207.
38 See Waggoner, Ch. x, esp. the discussion of “The Titmouse” and “The Oven Bird,” pp. 296–300.
39 For the central comparison of his essay “The Central Man: Emerson, Whitman, Wallace Stevens,” MR, 1 (1966), 23–42, Harold Bloom stresses Emerson's apocalyptic strain, though he states that it is limited to “a literal handful of poems” (p. 31).
40 Albert Gelpi, Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), p. 146, separates the Dionysian from the Apollonian strain which includes Eliot, Stevens, and Frost. Gelpi's schema carries on the tradition begun, according to Henney, pp. 56–60, by Stedman's Poets of America (1892), Stuart Sherman's Americans (1923), and Alfred Kreymborg's Our Singing Strength (1929). Fiedler, pp. 195–96, proposes four lines descending from Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, and Whitman. Waggoner, pp. 91–92, revises this to distinct lines from Emerson and Whitman, and a third Emerson-cum-Whit-man line leading to Hart Crane, Roethke, Denise Levertov.