1. Spiller, Robert, ed., The Van Wyck Brooks-Lewis Mumford Letters,: The Record of a Literary Friendship, 1921–63 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), p. 64Google Scholar. Both Brooks and Mumford thought the “dialectical crisis” Emerson endured was “the chronic malady of the American mind.”

2. See Brooks, , An Autobiography (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965 [1954, 1957, 1961])Google Scholar, and Hoopes, James, Van Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 162–3.Google Scholar

3. Brooks said in 1931 that the three books were intended to be “a sort of trilogy — tracing through … these three typical figures, as I saw them-Mark Twain (adaptation to the environment), Henry James (escape from the environment), Emerson (domination of the environment, which thus tends to create a more nearly ideal society) — the history of the American man of letters, touching all of his characteristic problems and indicating the proper nature of artistic success and what it means both to the individual and to society.” Quoted in Hoopes, , Brooks, , p. 190Google Scholar. See also pp. 153—4, 173, 439.

4. Spiller, , Letters, pp. 257–9, 103Google Scholar. Both authors had a deep sense of mission deriving from their interpretation of Emerson's role. Brooks in 1925 wrote that he was “so conscious, deep down about ‘the mission’ — what other word is there? — of literature, and the necessity of reasserting the idealistic point of view” (Hoopes, , Brooks, p. 173)Google Scholar. Mumford wrote him that his Makers and Finders series was “the sturdiest monument anyone had created in our generation,” adding, “Well done! No one in our time, and country, no one since Emerson himself, has worked to better purpose than you have” (Spiller, , Letters, pp. 218–19, 293).Google Scholar

5. I would cite two instances to illustrate how strong has remained the sense of mission inspired by the American Scholar address. The first is from Matthiessen, F. O.'s preface to his landmark book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), xv–xviGoogle Scholar: To Louis Sullivan's classic question, “Are you using such gifts [as you possess] for or against the people?” Matthiessen replied: “These standards are the inevitable and right extension of Emerson's demands in The American Scholar. The ensuing volume has value only to the extent that it comes anywhere near measuring up to them.”

In a special thirty-year retrospective issue of the American studies journal American Quarterly in 1979, fourteen scholars were asked to assess the American studies movement in higher education. Joel Jones of the University of New Mexico wrote: “The elemental and essential function of the American Studies movement in higher education … has been to perpetuate the spirit and substance of the ideal of ‘scholar’ as embodied in the lives and writings of Emerson, William James and F. O. Matthiessen For some of us the touchstone of the American Studies movement (as it manifested itself in both teaching and research) is Emerson's essay of 1837, ‘The American Scholar,’” American Quarterly, 31, No. 3, (1979), 382.Google Scholar

6. Birrell, Holmes and other appreciations may be found in Konvitz, Milton R. and Whicher, Stephen E., eds., Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp. 1–12Google Scholar. Curtis and others are in Spenser, Benjamin, The Quest for Nationality (Syracuse University Press, 1957), p. 159Google Scholar. More, Paul Elmer's judgment, in Shelburne Essays, Volume XIGoogle Scholar, that “it becomes more and more apparent that Emerson, judged by an international or even by a true national standard, is the outstanding figure in American letters” was widely accepted by the 1930s; James Truslow Adams in 1930 quoted More and told of reading Emerson “with great enthusiasm, and again and again” when he was sixteen and seventeen, but then set out to refute More's assessment; his essay and a vigorous refutation of it by Brown, Stuart Gerry are in Whicher, George F., ed., and Kennedy, Gail, rev., The Transcendentalist Revolt (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1968).Google Scholar

7. Many early expressions of cultural nationalism and opinions on the duties of the American Scholar may be found in Spencer (Quest), who makes quite a point out of the finding that others had made the same appeals for which Emerson is credited; Perry, Bliss, “Emerson's Speech,” in The Praise of Folly and Other Essays (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1964 [1923])Google Scholar; Jones, Howard Mumford, O Strange New World (New York: Viking Press, 1952)Google Scholar; Nye, Russel B., The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (New York: Harper and Row, 1960)Google Scholar; and Society and Culture in America, 1830–1860 (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)Google Scholar; and Orians, G. Harrison, A Short History of American Literature Analyzed by Decades (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1940)Google Scholar, a work that ought to be reissued and updated.

8. Holmes, , Lowell, , and Carlyle, in Perry, , “Emerson's Speech,” pp. 94–100.Google Scholar

9. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Selected Prose and Poetry, edited by Cook, Reginald L. (New York: Rinehart, 1957)Google Scholar; Cook is quoted from his introduction, p. viii. I will not hereafter cite specific sources for Emerson's speeches and journal entries. They may readily be found in various sources in addition to this editionfor example, in Emerson, , Nature, Addresses and Lectures (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1855)Google Scholar, which includes “The Young American”; Edel, Leon et al. , Masters of American Literature, Vol. I (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1959)Google Scholar; and Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vols. I–X, edited by Emerson, Edward Waldo and Forbes, Waldo Emerson (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910)Google Scholar. The standard older biography by Rusk, Ralph L., The Life of Emerson (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1932)Google Scholar has been replaced by Allen, Gay Wilson's Waldo Emerson (New York: Viking Press, 1981)Google Scholar. And, of course, there are Brooks, Van Wyck's The Life of Emerson (1932)Google Scholar and The Flowering of New England (1936)Google Scholar and Mumford, 's The Golden Day (1926).Google Scholar

10. Stuart Gerry Brown (in Whicher, , Transcendentalist Revolt)Google Scholar calls attention to the proofs of Emerson's propensity to rebel and concludes, “From the plea for frankness and originality in ‘The American Scholar’ and denunciation of clerical pretense and hypocrisy in the ‘Divinity School Address’ to the campaign against compromise grown cowardly and against human slavery twenty years later, there is a straight and ever clearer path.” Brown argues that by restoring the context of Emerson's life and times, “we shall find the real Emerson, a prophet whose value for Americans of 1953 is perhaps not less than it was for his contemporaries.” I am suggesting that the same can be said for Emerson today.

11. Miller, Lillian B., Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 24–25Google Scholar, and the “apologia” chapter.

12. See Hopkins, Vivian C., Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson's Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 4–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. I am relying here on the conclusion, after her survey of all his speeches, by Miller, , Patrons, p. 26.Google Scholar

14. Brooks, , An AutobiographyGoogle Scholar, and Hoopes, , Brooks, p. 163.Google Scholar

15. Smith felt that Emerson's need to find a vocation for himself at the time he delivered the address was his greatest motivation for it. Literary nationalism, he feels, was “only an incidental topic for Emerson. … What he is primarily concerned with is how the young American scholar can find a place in American society.” Smith, , “The American Scholar Today,” Southwest Review, Summer 1963, pp. 191–9Google Scholar, and “Emerson's Problem of Vocation — A Note on ‘The American Scholar,’” New England Quarterly, 03–12 1939Google Scholar, reprinted in Konvitz, and Whicher, , Emerson Collection.Google Scholar

16. Adams, Richard P., “Emerson and the Organic Metaphor,” PMLA, 79 (03 1954), pp. 117–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar is one of the best of many discussions of organic form in Emerson's thought; I quote from page 124.

17. All of Lewis Mumford's writings typify this view. For a quick summary as it affects literature and architecture, see the chapters “What the American Tradition is Not” and “The Birth of a New World” in Mumford, , Roots of Contemporary Architecture (New York; Reinhold, 1952)Google Scholar. Emerson's views as reported in Novak, Barbara's chapter, “The Organic Foreground: Plants,” in her Nature and Culture (New York: Oxford Universiy Press, 1980), pp. 104–9Google Scholar, are pertinent to theories of painting and literature. Coleridge was probably the primary source to Emerson, in his lines: “The organic form … is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form,” or his characterization of Shakespeare: “Growth as in a plant” — “All is growth, evolution, genesis — each line, each word almost, begets the following.”

18. On Emerson's struggles to come to terms with his era, including its attitudes toward Europe, see Porte, Joel, Representative Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. For an unsympathetic reading of the contrast between his public optimism and private anxieties, see Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 1975), pp. 173, 178–9.Google Scholar

19. In 1843, he wrote in his journal, “God is promoted by the worst. Don't despise even the Kneelands and Andrew Jacksons” (Abner Kneeland was a freethinker who had just been jailed for blasphemy), which Matthiessen, , American Renaissance, p. 318Google Scholar, declares to be an early example of Emerson's principle of “compensation.” On his decision to include Napoleon in his Representative Men, see Porte, , Representative MenGoogle Scholar and Miller, Perry, Nature's Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 169–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Perry, , “Emerson's Speech,” p. 97Google Scholar. In May of 1843, Emerson recorded in his journal: “Our American lives are somewhat poor and pallid, Franklins and Washingtons, no fiery grain. Staid men like our pale and timid Flora.” In June of 1847, he was actually speaking of Daniel Webster when he wrote, “Is not America more than ever wanting in the male principle? … Webster is a man by himself of the great mould, but he also underlies the American blight, and wants the power of the initiative, the affirmative talent, and remains, like the literary class, only a commentator.”

21. “I like man, but not men,” he told his journal in March 1846. The seminal essay for the discussion of Emerson's concept of genius is Miller, Perry's “Emersonian Genius and the American Democracy” (1953)Google Scholar, reprinted in Miller, , Nature's NationGoogle Scholar, and Konvitz, and Whicher, , Emerson Collection.Google Scholar

22. See Aaron, 's “Emerson and the Progressive Tradition” in his Men of Good Hope (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951)Google Scholar, reprinted in Konvitz, and Whicher, , Emerson Collection, pp. 88–9.Google Scholar

23. Emerson, , Matthiessen, , and Dewey, in Matthiessen, , American Renaissance, p. 3–5Google Scholar. (This is not to suggest that Emerson was not a thoroughgoing Platonist; I am persuaded by Brown, Stuart Gerry — in “Emerson's Platonism,” New England Quarterly, 18, No. 3, 09 1945CrossRefGoogle Scholar — that he was.) The distinction between Understanding and the Soul was more commonly labeled Understanding versus “Reason,” and contrasted perception of phenomena through the senses and related to matter — the material world — against intelligibles, ideasthe world of the spirit. Emerson extolled “Reason as the immediate intuition of truth by a genius, above the journeyman Understanding, which genius shares with other men,” and asserted, in Vivian Hopkins's words, “that the artist, through Reason, attains direct contact with the Divine mind, deriving his intuition for creation” (Spires of Form, pp. 8–9).Google Scholar

24. Adams, , “Organic Metaphor,” p. 124.Google Scholar

25. On Americans in Italy, see Brooks, Van Wyck, The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760–1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958)Google Scholar and Novak, Barbara, “Arcadia Revisited: Americans in Italy” in Nature and Culture.Google Scholar

26. In fairness to Greenough, it should be noted that he made his statue neoclassical to suit a neoclassical conception of architecture already there, feeling that sculpture should always be subordinate to the building it adorned. “Had I been ordered to make a statue for a square … I should have represented Washington on horseback and in his usual dress, and have made my work a purely historical one. I have treated the subject poetically.” Quoted by Fitch, John Marston, “Horatio Greenough and the Art of the Machine,” in Drozdowski, Eugene C., ed. American Civilization: Readings in the Cultural and Intellectual History of the United States (Glenview, Ill.: Scott-Foresman, 1972), p. 233Google Scholar. For reactions to Greenough's statue, see Miller, , Patrons, pp. 58–65.Google Scholar

27. See especially, for the views of both, Metzger, Charles R., Emerson and Greenough: Transcendentalist Pioneers of an American Esthetic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954)Google Scholar; see also Matthiessen, 's chapter on Greenough in American RenaissanceGoogle Scholar; and Hopkins, , Spires of Form, pp. 80–92.Google Scholar

28. It is interesting that Frank Lloyd Wright traced some of these same aspects of organic form not to the Greeks but to Gothic architecture: “I have called this feeling for the organic character of form and treatment the Gothic spirit,” he wrote in 1910, “for it was more completely realized in the forms of that architecture, perhaps, than any other.” Quoted by Egbert, Donald Drew, “The Idea of Organic Expression in American Architecture,” in Persons, Stow, ed. Evolutionary Thought in America (New York: George Braziller, 1956), p. 344.Google Scholar

29. Egbert summarizes well how Greenough and Emerson anticipated evolutionary ideas of Darwin, and Agassiz, , in “Organic Expression,” pp. 334–50Google Scholar. Fitch discusses how Greenough anticipated the Bauhaus with his views, in “Horatio Greenough and the Machine,” pp. 230–5Google Scholar. Novak provides new insights into Emerson's attitues toward Darwinism and evolution in Nature and Culture, Chapters IV and VI, including n. 65.

30. Greenough's essays, written during the 1840s and 1851, and published in 1852 by Putnam's, may be found in various collections. All quotations I have used are from Greenough, , Form and Function: Remarks on Art, Design and Architecture, edited by Small, Harold A. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958).Google Scholar

31. Greenough, , Form and FunctionGoogle Scholar. For Sullivan, see his Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), p. 160Google Scholar, and Bush-Brown, Albert, Louis Sullivan (New York: George Braziller, 1960).Google Scholar

32. Sullivan, , Kindergarten ChatsGoogle Scholar, and quoted by Egbert, in “Organic Expression,” p. 355Google Scholar. Bush-Brown summarizes five elements of Sullivan's organic principle: (1) architecture should be intuitive; “rational principles and formulas” were, he said, “dangerous things”; (2) architecture should be adapted to its environment and its age; (3) architecture must express its function; (4) architecture must be “truthful” to its subject and purpose; (5) architecture should “seek ornament based on natural growth,” Sullivan, pp. 19–20, n. 73.Google Scholar

33. Sullivan's poetic interpretation of ornament as organic is in his monograph A System of Architectural Ornament According to the Philosophy of Man's Powers (Washington, D.C.: Press of the American Institute of Architects, 1924.)Google Scholar

34. Frank Lloyd Wright quoted by Egbert, , “Organic Expression,” pp. 352–61Google Scholar, and see, in addition to his London lectures, his essay, “Organic Structure in Nature,” in Wright, , An American Architecture, edited by Kaufman, Edgar (New York: Horizon Press, 1955).Google Scholar

35. Egbert, , “Organic Expression,”Google Scholar and see Twombly, Robert C.'s excellent Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture (New York: John Wiley & sons, 1979), esp. Chap. 11Google Scholar, “Organic Architecture, 1930–1959.”

36. The two definitions of organicism are from Bush-Brown, Louis Sullivan. Wright's reservations about the International Style as “a style that could never be democratic because it is the use of man by the machine” and Walter Gropius's rebuttal are in Egbert, , “Organic Expression,” p. 385Google Scholar. For Emerson's three definitions of the organic, see Hopkins, , Spires of Form, pp. 69–71.Google Scholar

37. For quotations from Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau in this entire section, I am using especially the Rinehart editions of writings by Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman; Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, edited by Kouwenhoven, John (New York: Random House, 1950)Google Scholar; Miller, Perry, ed., The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry (New York: Doubleday, 1957)Google Scholar; Matthiessen, , American RenaissanceGoogle Scholar; and Edel, Leon et al. , Masters of American LiteratureGoogle Scholar, which includes Thoreau's essay “Walking.”

38. Lewis, R. W. B., The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 45Google Scholar, and his chapter “The Case Against the Past.”

39. Ibid., pp. 30, 21, 27. “Thoreau, like most other members of the hopeful party, understood dawn and birth better than he did night and death. He responded at once to the cockerel in the morning; the screech owls at night made him bookish and sentimental.”

40. Lerner, , America as a Civilization, Vol. 1 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), pp. 23–8.Google Scholar

41. Emerson's “Historic Notes” are in Miller, , American TranscendentalistsGoogle Scholar, and see Matthiessen, 's discussion of “Consciousness,” American Renaissance, pp. 5–14Google Scholar. In The American Scholar, he himself had hailed the new introspective consciousness: “Our age is bewailed as the age of introversion. Must that needs be evil? … Do we fear lest we should outsee nature and God, and drink truth dry? … If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution, when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being compared.… This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”

42. American Renaissance, p. 29.Google Scholar

43. Actually Robert Dumm describing Whitman and Charles Ives. See note 77.

44. See works cited in notes 47 and 48, below, and Callow, James T., Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807–1855 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967).Google Scholar

45. “Never does one come closer to the age's sense of the enormous fertility of life than when these men are discovering the fresh resources of words” (Matthiessen, , American Renaissance, pp. 30–44).Google Scholar

46. Canaday, , “Luminism and Modern Taste,” The New Republic, 04 26, 1980, pp. 25–28Google Scholar. The change “keynoted” by the exhibition is described by Stevens, Mark, “Let There Be Light,” Newsweek, 02 18, 1980, pp. 114–15.Google Scholar

47. The phrase is Earl Powell's in the catalog to the exhibit, Wilmerding, John, ed., American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875-Paintings, Drawings, Photographs (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1980)Google Scholar. The two essays by Wilmerding and essays by Lisa Fellows Andrus, Albert Gelpi, David C. Huntington, Barbara Novak, Powell, and Theodore Stebbins are pertinent to my discussion here.

48. Novak, , American Painting in the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969)Google Scholar; I have already cited Nature and Culture (1980)Google Scholar. Wilmerding, , American LightGoogle Scholar, cites the criticisms offered of her thesis since it appeared in the 1969 book-lack of attention to Church (for which Huntington and others compensate); overclaiming for her “luminist tradition” in extending it to cover Copley, Harnett, and such artists of the twentieth century as Sheeler, Hopper, Wyeth, and Sol Lewitt; and her treatment of Sanford Gifford as a “cosmopolitan luminist.” My own minor criticism is that she uses luminism as a measure of worth-the more luminist the traits, the more praise for the artist-but I agree with Wilmerding and others that her works have been of singular importance to revaluating American landscape painting, and I am indebted to Novak not only for her perceptive analysis of her own thesis but also for her sensitivity to evidence relating to mine.

Examples of other scholarship Novak's discovery of the luminists has inspired are Conron, John, “‘Bright American Rivers’: The Luminist Landscapes of Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,”Google Scholar and Miller, David Cameron, “Kindred Spirits: Martin Johnson Heade, Painter; Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Poet; and the Identification with ‘Desert’ Places,” both in American Quarterly, 32, No. 2 (Summer 1980), 144–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. Jarves, , The Art Idea: Sculpture, Painting and Architecture in America (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1864)Google Scholar. All of Perry Miller's writings are pertinent to the discussion of American Nature, and it is significant that Albert Gelpi dedicates his essay in American Light, pp. 291–312, to Miller.Google Scholar

50. See Powell, , “Luminism and the American Sublime,” American Light, pp. 69–95.Google Scholar

51. Novak, , American Painting, pp. 121, 125–37Google Scholar, and Nature and Culture, pp. 117–27.Google Scholar

52. Mark Stevens (in “Let There Be Light”) thinks “there would have been no need to celebrate nature in art, if nature had not been threatened in life. Luminist painters are like Victorians' silky portrayals of innocent, blushing girls. The subtext is rape”-an interpretation with which one obviously can disagree.

53. Lowens, , “Writing about Music in the Periodicals of American Transcendentalism, (1835–1850),” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 10, Summer 1957, 71–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

54. While no one has yet done for music what Matthiessen has done for literature, Mumford and others for architecture, and Novak and the others for painting in tracing Emerson's influence, the importance of vernacular elements and vernacular traditions as fulfillment of the “democratic tendencies” Emerson celebrated has been acknowledged in major histories: Chase, Gilbert's America's Music (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955)Google Scholar-see p. 634; Hitchcock, H. Wiley's Music in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974)Google Scholar, which first used the terms “vernacular” and “cultivated” to describe two native traditions; Kingman, Daniel, American Music: A Panorama (New York, Macmillan Schirmer, 1979)Google Scholar; Hamm, Charles, Music in the New World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982)Google Scholar; and Mellers, Wilfrid, Music in a New-Found Land (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965)Google Scholar, which is especially good on the themes and attitudes I am dealing with. A good brief survey of several relevant traditions is in Bruce, Neely's “Ives and Nineteenth-Century American Music,” in Hitchcock, H. Wiley and Perlis, Vivian, eds., An Ives Celebration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), pp. 29–44.Google Scholar

55. Zuck, Barbara A., A History of Musical Americanism (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1980), pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

56. Fry's preface is in Chase, Gilbert, ed., The American Composer Speaks (Baton Rouge: Louisana State University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

57. Fry's call for a Declaration of Independence is in Lowens, Irving, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), pp. 215–18Google Scholar. The criticism that follows is in Dwight's Journal, 5, 05 20, 1854, p. 54.Google Scholar

58. The subject is surveyed in Rider, Daniel E., “The Musical Thought and Activities of New England Transcendentalists,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1964Google Scholar. Lowens, , “Writing about Music,” pp. 71–79Google Scholar, is directly relevant, and Rosalie Sandra Perry points to elements of Transcendentalism in the writings of Thoreau, Fuller, Margaret, Dwight, John S., and Curtis, George W. in Charles Ives and the American Mind (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1974), pp. 19–26.Google Scholar

59. Lowens, , “Writing about Music,” p. 71Google Scholar; Cooke, George Willis, John Sullivan Dwight: A Biography (1898; rpt. Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books, 1973), pp. 13, 22.Google Scholar

60. Quoted in Lowens, , “Writing about Music,” p. 78.Google Scholar

61. See the quotation beginning this section, taken from Emerson's journal and quoted by Hopkins, , Spires of Form, pp. 190–1Google Scholar. See also his Journal, Vol. IV, pp. 147, 364–5.

62. I discuss the confrontation in my “Fry versus Dwight: American Music's Debate over Nationality,” in American Music, Vol. 3, No. 2, ed. Allen Britton (1985)Google Scholar. Or see Hatch, Christopher, “Music for America: A Critical Controversy of the 1850's,” American Quarterly, 14, No. 4 (Winter 1962), 578–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, or Upton, William T., William Henry Fry (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1947), pp. 124–139.Google Scholar

63. All the quotations are in Chmaj, , “Fry versus Dwight,” taken from Dwight's Journal and the New York Tribune for 1853–1854Google Scholar, some quoted by Upton, , Fry, pp. 129–35.Google Scholar

64. Long-time readers of Prospects will recognize that I am expanding upon a familiar line of argument in the paragraphs that follow. My lengthy essay, “Sonata for American Studies: Perspectives on Charles Ives,” was published in Prospects IV, edited by Salzman, Jack (New York: Burt Franklin and Co., 1979), pp. 1–58Google Scholar. Since then, I have written on Ives and the Transcendentalist writers in two papers, “How Charles Ives Put Down the Concord Bards” (Unpublished paper for 1983 Meeting of the Sonneck Society, Philadelphia, Pa., March 4, 1983, and the California American Studies Association, Stanford University, April 29, 1983) and “As I Was Saying: Emerson and the Concord Sonata” (for the 1984 Meeting of the Sonneck Society, Boston, Mass., March 1984, as well as the 1984 convention of the European Association for American Studies, Rome, April 1984).

65. On pp. 5–6 of the “Emerson” movement of Ives, Charles's Second Piano Sonata: Concord Mass., 1840–1860 (the 2nd ed., Associated Music Publishers)Google Scholar may be found a striking illustration of Emerson's Double Consciousness. Ives meant this movement to represent Emerson's thought, his stream of consciousness. Two musical ideas could scarcely be further apart than the two represented on these two pages. The passage on p. 5 is mainly atonal; it is constructed of “motives”-fragments representing elements of experience, set forth without apology, their ragged edges showing. The texture is dense, using as many as eleven voices sounding at once, multiple layers of reality. The music moves in blocks of sound, often abruptly but confidently and grandly. The passage on p. 6 is very different. It is tonal, melodic (a two-part period, symmetrical-a mirror image), and contained. The music is reflective, complete and still-a glimpse of unity. It crystallizes out of the mind of the great thinker.

I wish to acknowledge, with affection and respect, my student Joseph Behney, a music major at California State University, Sacramento, who wrote a term paper for me on Ives's “Emerson” movement and Emerson's essay, “Circles,” in which he contrasted and analyzed the passages on pp. 5 and 6 of the score as two musical ideas which “couldn't be farther apart in sense, sound and shape.”

66. In my favorite sentence from his Essays Before a Sonata, edited by Boatwright, Howard (New York, W. W. Norton, 1970 [1920])Google Scholar, “Epilogue,” p. 92Google Scholar, Ives invites the composer to be “open to all the over-values within his reach, - … if he accepts all and sympathizes with all, is influenced by all, whether consciously or unconsciously, drastically or humbly, audibly or inaudibly, whether it be all the virtue of Satan or the only evil of Heaven-and all, even at one time, even in one chord -then it may be that the value of his substance … is growing and approaching nearer and nearer to perfect truths.” See Chmaj, , “Sonata for American Studies,” pp. 13–14.Google Scholar

67. See Ives, 's Essays, p. 36Google Scholar (on “the common heart of Concord” as representing the highest goal for human aspiration); pp. 80–1 (on “‘Aunt Sarah,’ who scrubbed her life away, for her brother's ten orphans, the fervency with which this woman, after a fourteen-hour work day on the farm, would hitch up and drive five miles, through the mud and rain for ‘prayer meetin’” … -“if he [the composer] can reflect the fervency of such a spirit, he may find there a local color that will do all the world good”), and his Memos, edited by Kirkpatrick, John (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972)Google Scholar, (for his father's advice about “old John Bull the stonemason,” who sang off-key: “Look into his face and hear the music of the ages.”)

68. A good analysis of Ives's music that emphasizes his Transcendentalism is in Mellers, Wilfrid, Music in a New-Found Land (New York: Knopf, 1965)Google Scholar. On Ives and postmodernism, see my “Sonata for American Studies,” pp. 43–44.Google Scholar

69. Ives credits Emerson with his own political beliefs in the Essays, pp. 28–9Google Scholar. He seems to have climbed into Emerson's mind when writing his several versions of the “Emerson” movement. John Kirkpatrick was irritated at first to discover the variants because he did not see Ives's point, but after playing them all several times, he discovered something new each time so that “everything changes slightly”; Ives himself explained them by saying, “It is a peculiar experience, and, I must admit, a stimulating and agreeable one that I've had with this Emerson music. It may have something to do with the feeling I have about Emerson, for every time I read him I seem to get a new angle of thought and feeling and experience from him” (Memos, p. 78)Google Scholar. Kirkpatrick, in Perlis, Vivian, ed., Charles Ives Remembered (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 215.Google Scholar

70. Kirkpatrick, ibid., p. 218.

71. In Memos, pp. 188–9.Google Scholar

72. Brooks, William, “Ives Today,” in An lues Celebration, pp. 212–13.Google Scholar

73. Behrend, , “Prelude to a Recital,”Google Scholar privately printed pamphlet to introduce her performance of the Concord Sonata for the Philadelphia Composers' Forum, 1966. See also the discussions of the Concord Sonata in Chase, Mellers, and Henry, and Cowells, Sidney, Charles Ives and His Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).Google Scholar

74. Ward, Keith C., “Charles Ives and Musical Translation: Assimilation of the OverSoul,”Google Scholar unpublished paper, courtesy of the author, Pennsylvania State University. Ward traces “three musical devices Ives uses to symbolize this everbecoming, unifying spirit,” the Oversoul, and points out that in program notes for such contemplative works as “The Unanswered Question” and “Central Park in the Dark,” Ives himself called such music the sound of silence or darkness, or “silent darkness.” Ward, , pp. 8–9.Google Scholar

75. See Kirkpatrick, 's preface pp. viii–ixGoogle Scholar, to Ives, , Symphony No. 4 (New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1963 [1920–29]Google Scholar, and Ives, , Memos, p. 66.Google Scholar

76. Hermann and Harrison, quoted in Chmaj, , “Sonata for American Studies,” pp. 19, 36Google Scholar. For Ives's words, see note 66.

77. Dumm, , Clavier, 10 1974, p. 21.Google Scholar

78. For my discussion of Ives and postmodernism, see Chmaj, , “Sonata,” pp. 43–44.Google Scholar