1. Lowell, , “Thoreau,” in My Study Windows (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), pp. 197–98.Google Scholar

2. Foucault, , Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Bouchard, Donald F. and Simon, Sherry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 154.Google Scholar

3. Holmes, , Ralph Waldo Emerson/John Lathrop Motley: Two Memoirs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), p. 88.Google Scholar

4. Burke, , The Philosophy of Literary Form, revised edition, abridged by the author (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 3.Google Scholar

5. Pocock, , Politics, Language, Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 25.Google Scholar

6. Emerson, , “The American Scholar,” in Collected Works, ed. Spiller, Robert E. and Ferguson, Alfred R. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), vol. 1, p. 52Google Scholar. All subsequent references to “The American Scholar” will be included in the text. References to other essays from this volume will also be included in the text and abbreviated CW 1.

7. As Rush Welter observes, “During the early years of the [nineteenth] century, men who were fearful of social change had looked to the activity of college graduates to counteract untoward developments. This was especially the case in New England, where Phi Beta Kappa orators and other college spokesmen celebrated both the claims educated men had on their country and the responsibility they acquired to lead it. … [T]hey appealed to educated men to act as the conscience of the republic and described a political elite whose influence would depend less on their scrabbling for votes than on their power to sway the multitude.” The Mind of America: 1820–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 279.Google Scholar

8. See Simpson, Lewis P., The Federalist Literary Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), pp. 3–41Google Scholar; Simpson, , “Joseph Stevens Buckminster and the Rise of the New England Clerisy,” in The Man of Letters in New England and the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), pp. 3–31Google Scholar; Simpson, , “Federalism and the Crisis of Literary Order,” American Literature 32 (1960): 253–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buell, Lawrence, “Joseph Stevens Buckminster: The Making of a New England Saint,” Canadian Review of American Studies 10 (1979): 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Howe, Daniel Walker, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 174–80.Google Scholar

9. Buckminster, , “The Dangers and Duties of Men of Letters,” in Federalist Literary Mind, ed. Simpson, p. 95.Google Scholar

10. Ticknor quoted in Tyack, David B., George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Simpson, , “Joseph Stevens Buckminster,” p. 24.Google Scholar

12. Ticknor quoted in Simpson, , “Joseph Stevens Buckminster,” p. 22Google Scholar. As Buell remarks, “Even though [Buckminster] was not actually a saint it is possible to understand how he might have passed for one with an audience looking for charisma, polish, learning, and good morals” (Buell, , “Joseph Stevens Buckminster,” p. 7).Google Scholar

13. See Formisano, Ronald P., The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, and Scott, Donald M., From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978)Google Scholar. Set against the enormous political power of the early New England clergy, Buckminster's loftiness “seems to mark a stage in the disengagement of piety and learning from the world of affairs which led, during the nineteenth century, to what we now call the alienation of the intellectual” (Buell, , “Joseph Stevens Buckminster,” p. 23Google Scholar). In Buckminster's time, however — and even in the early Emerson's — it was still possible to believe in a transpolitical moral authority exercised by a clerisy that had distanced itself (or become distanced from) electoral politics and relied on a direct appeal to public opinion (see Scott, , From Office to Profession, pp. 33–35).Google Scholar

14. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Rusk, Ralph L. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), vol. 4, p. 179.Google Scholar

15. For Emerson's admiration of Buckminster, see The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Gilman, William et al. , 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982), vol. 2, p. 365, and vol. 3, pp. 185, 194Google Scholar. All subsequent references to the Journals will be included in the text and abbreviated JMN.

16. Howe, , The Unitarian Conscience, p. 176.Google Scholar

17. Lawrence Buell discusses the preeminent place of oratory in early-19th-Century Boston in New England Literary Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 137–65.Google Scholar

18. Welter, , Mind of America, p. 179.Google Scholar

19. For portraits of Hayward and Hildreth, auditors of the kind “The American Scholar” assumes, see Williams, Henry, Memorials of the Class of 1837 of Harvard University (Boston: George Ellis, 1887), pp. 17–22.Google Scholar

20. The relationship between the identity crisis of late adolescence and periods of historical crisis is a major theme in the work of Erik H. Erikson, particularly Young Man Luther (1958)Google Scholar, Insight and Responsibility (1964)Google Scholar, and Life History and the Historical Moment (1975).Google Scholar

21. See Sealts, Merton M. Jr., “Emerson on the Scholar, 1833–1837,” PMLA 85 (1970): 189–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Burke, , Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 75.Google Scholar

23. Burkholder, , “The Radical Emerson: Politics in ‘The American Scholar’,” ESQ 34 (1988): 44.Google Scholar

24. Leverenz, David, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 74Google Scholar. As Ann Douglas remarks, “No one past or present has accused liberal Protestantism of effeminacy more seriously or more frequently than the nineteenth-century ‘liberal’ ministers themselves” (The Feminization of American Culture [New York: Knopf, 1977], p. 18).Google Scholar

25. Cabot, James Elliot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887), vol. 1, p. 34.Google Scholar

26. Emerson, , “The Christian Minister: Part I,” in Young Emerson Speaks, ed. McGiffert, Arthur C. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), p. 22.Google Scholar

27. Henry Nash Smith first commented on the narrative quality of Emerson's major addresses in his seminal essay “Emerson's Problem of Vocation — A Note on ‘The American Scholar,’” New England Quarterly 12 (1939): 52–67Google Scholar. More recently, Jeffrey Steele has likened Emerson's effort “to convert his audience by means of dramatized personae offered as role-models” to the therapeutic process of psychoanalysis (Steele, , The Representation of Self in the American Renaissance [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987], p. 4Google Scholar).

28. Emerson, , “Address on Education,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Whicher, Stephen E., Spiller, Robert E., and Williams, Wallace E. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), vol. 2, p. 196Google Scholar. Future references to this volume will be included in the text and abbreviated EL II. Carolyn Porter discusses Marxist reification in Emersonian America in Seeing and Being (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), pp. 23–118.Google Scholar

29. Emerson, , “Luther,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Whicher, Stephen E. and Spiller, Robert E. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), vol. 1, p. 143.Google Scholar

30. Gouldner, , The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (New York: Continuum, 1976), pp. 83–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. As William Charvat observed, “The crash supplied [Emerson] with an object lesson, a factual point of reference, which gave his still-developing idealism a special cogency and a vindication” (Charvat, , “American Romanticism and the Depression of 1837,” in The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers of William Charvat, ed. Bruccoli, Matthew J. [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968], p. 63)Google Scholar. For a discussion of Emerson and the Panic of 1837, see Packer, B. L., Emerson's Fall (New York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 95–102Google Scholar; see also Ziff, Larzer, Literary Democracy (New York: Viking, 1981), pp. 17–21.Google Scholar

32. Sealts, , “Emerson on the Scholar,” p. 194Google Scholar. See EL 2:180.Google Scholar

33. Burkholder connects Emerson's initial attitude toward the Panic to anxieties about the security of his invested capital (Burkholder, , “The Radical Emerson,” p. 50–51).Google Scholar

34. Emerson, , Collected Works, vol. 2Google Scholar: Essays: First Series, ed. Slater, Joseph, Ferguson, Alfred R., and Carr, Jean Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 45.Google Scholar

35. See Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).Google Scholar

36. Lentricchia, , Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 13, 14.Google Scholar

37. Emerson, , “The Genuine Man,” in Young Emerson Speaks, p. 180.Google Scholar

38. See Burkholder, , “The Radical Emerson,” pp. 42–43Google Scholar. See also Charvat, , “American Romanticism,” p. 64.Google Scholar

39. Leverenz, , Manhood, p. 52.Google Scholar

40. Erikson, , Young Man Luther (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 42.Google Scholar

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42. Burkholder, , “The Radical Emerson,” p. 39.Google Scholar

43. Spiller, and Ferguson, , Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 51.Google Scholar

44. Quoted in Spiller, and Ferguson, , Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 51.Google Scholar

45. Bradford, George P., “Philosophic Thought in Boston,” in Memorial History of Boston, ed. Winsor, Justin (Boston: Osgood, 1883), vol. 4, p. 301.Google Scholar

46. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau: Early Essays and Miscellanies, ed. Moldenhauer, Joseph J. and Moser, Edwin, with Kern, Alexander C. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 115, 116, 117Google Scholar. Further references to Thoreau's address will be included in the text.

47. Erikson, , Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), p. 263.Google Scholar

48. Williams, , Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 132, 133.Google Scholar

49. Williams, , Marxism and Literature, p. 117.Google Scholar

50. See Williams, , Marxism and Literature, pp. 110–11Google Scholar, and Lears, T. J. Jackson, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 567–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. Lowell, , “Thoreau,” p. 197.Google Scholar

52. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Spiller, Robert E. and Williams, Wallace E. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), vol. 3, p. 92.Google Scholar

53. Whicher, , Selections From Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 179.Google Scholar

54. Porter, , Seeing and Being, p. 61.Google Scholar

55. Cayton, , “The Making of An American Prophet: Emerson, His Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture Industry in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 613–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

56. Brownson, , “Emerson's Essays,” in Critical Essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Burkholder, Robert E. and Myerson, Joel (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), p. 74Google Scholar. See also Channing, William Henry, “[The American Scholar],”Google Scholar in Burkholder, and Myerson, , Critical Essays, p. 19.Google Scholar

57. Williams, , Marxism and Literature, p. 192.Google Scholar

58. “Whitman to Emerson, 1856,” in Leaves of Grass, ed. Bradley, Sculley and Blodgett, Harold W. (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 741.Google Scholar

59. Whitman, , “A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads,” in Leaves of Grass, ed. Bradley and Blodgett, p. 571.Google Scholar

60. See Gilmore, Michael T., American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 8–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61. Whitman, , “Preface 1855,” in Leaves of Grass, ed. Bradley and Blodgett, p. 731.Google Scholar

62. “Whitman to Emerson, 1856,” p. 735.Google Scholar

63. “Whitman to Emerson, 1856,” p. 737.Google Scholar

64. Buell, , New England Literary Culture, p. 56.Google Scholar

65. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Walden, ed. Shanley, J. Lyndon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 4.Google Scholar

66. Whitman, , “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of GrassGoogle Scholar, ed. Bradley and Blodgett, line 33. Unless otherwise noted, all future reference to Whitman's poems will be to this edition.

67. Charvat, , “Melville,” in The Profession of Authorship in America, p. 246.Google Scholar

68. For a discussion of this new consciousness in Moby-Dick — and of the relation of Ahab's tragedy to the rhetorical structure I have been describing — see Milder, Robert, “Moby-Dick: The Rationale of Narrative Form,” in Approaches to Teaching Melville's “Moby-Dick,” ed. Bickman, Martin (New York: Modern Language Association, 1985), pp. 35–49.Google Scholar

69. Whitman, , “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, vol. 1: Poems, 1855–56, ed. Bradley, Sculley et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, lines 98–101. Line 101 appears only in the 1856 and 1860 editions of Leaves of Grass but is a telling indication of Whitman's rhetorical purpose.

70. Williams, , Marxism and Literature, p. 195.Google Scholar

71. See Broderick, John C., “The Movement of Thoreau's Prose,” American Literature 32 (1961): 133–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Buell, , Literary Transcendentalism, pp. 188–207.Google Scholar

72. Lewis, , “Always Going Out and Coming in,” in Walt Whitman, ed. Murphy, Francis (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), pp. 450–51.Google Scholar

73. Lowell, , “Thoreau,” p. 204.Google Scholar

74. As Burke remarks, “The motivation out of which [an author] writes is synonomous with the structural way in which he puts events values together when he writes,” however partial his recognition of this at the time (Burke, , Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 18).Google Scholar

75. As Robert Weimann observes, “Structure is born out of [the] interaction by which the poet and his audience, and also the self and the social within the poet, are all genetically connected.” Even these terms are somewhat crude, since the “self” and the “social” within a given consciousness cannot be contradistinguished; the self is always a social creation, though never entirely so (Weimann, , Structure and Society in Literary Theory, expanded edition [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984], pp. 7–8).Google Scholar

76. Leverenz, , Manhood, p. 15.Google Scholar

77. Foucault, , “What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Bouchard, Donald F. and Simon, Sherry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 131.Google Scholar

78. Thoreau, , Journal, vol. 1: 1837–1844, ed. Broderick, John C. et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 393.Google Scholar

Thanks to recent scholarship, the lines of transmission between Emerson and the midcentury writers are more distinct now than in 1964 when Jonathan Bishop remarked on an influence “so indirect or pervasive or complex” that those who responded to Emerson could hardly have “disentangle[d] exactly what they found in [his] work from what was in the air” (Bishop, , Emerson on the Soul [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964], p. 144CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Among the recent works that have contributed significantly to an understanding of Emerson's influence on the midcentury writers are Lebeaux, Richard, Young Man Thoreau (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Sealts, Merton M. Jr., “Melville and Emerson's Rainbow,” ESQ 26 (1980): 53–78Google Scholar; and Loving, Jerome, Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).Google Scholar