Spotlight - Ralph Waldo Emerson

              by Artur Wielgus

– The American Scholar –

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

Emerson started the Romanticism movement in American literature with an oration   delivered at Cambridge on August 31, 1837. He was a Harvard-educated philosopher, theologian and poet.      

In his philosophical prose, Emerson first states that “Our day of   dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to   a close. New days and new events are bringing new characters and new hope.

Who can doubt, that poetry will revive and lead in a new age. The time is   already come when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from  under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectations of the world with   something better than the exertions of mechanical skill.” He describes the scholar as the   delegated intellect, as profound thinker and that the scholar never should   be the parrot of other men’s thinking.    

There can be no scholar without the heroic mind. Truth and immortal thoughts   need to come from him. The scholar ought to look forward to an ever-expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator.  “America should no longer   rely on England or Europe for its literature but to create its own and later   contribute to literatures of other countries. Poetry needs to regain its   place in many newspapers and be valued equally with a prose.” Emerson is challenging us to create great national literature.  His romanticism is expressed in the statement: “The literature of the poor,   the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of   household life, are the topics of the time.”      

In “The Method of Nature” he says “The scholars are the priests of that   thought which establishes the foundations of the earth. They stand for the   spiritual interest of the world.” Later he adds that “the sleepy nations are occupied with their political routine.”      

In his essay, The Poet Emerson says “The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression. Doubt not, o poet, but persist.”      

In the essay Nature, Emerson asks “Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition?      

In the “Self-Reliance” essay he says “The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude”.      

He was the transcendentalist and had seen the universe as composed of Nature and the Soul. His transcendentalist vision insisted that the mind can apprehend absolute spiritual truths without the help of the senses, which was another Romanticism notion, because as philosopher I. Kant observed the mind has its limits, its inability to absolutely know reality.      

Are we faithful to Emerson’s ideas 170 years later, or are we other men’s parrots?     

Truth needs to come out of us, for there is no freedom outside of truth.  I selected one short poem for better insight into Emerson’s poetic mind. The form of   seven syllables is almost constant throughout the poem. It is rhythmic and   follows the meter. Its stanzas rhyme in ac, bd pattern. He is better known   for his prose than his poetry. Emerson’s body is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts      

© Artur Wielgus 2007    

The Apology

Think me not unkind and rude
    That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
    To fetch his word to men.

Tax not my sloth that I
    Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
    Writes a letter in my book.

Chide me not, laborious band,
    For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand
    Goes home loaded with a thought.

There was never mystery
    But ‘tis figured in the flowers;
Was never secret history
    But birds tell it in the bowers.

One harvest from thy field
    Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield,
    Which I gather in a song.

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