Visibility Beyond the Visible : The Poetic Discourse of American Transcendentalism [1 ed.] 9789401208314, 9789042035560

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Visibility beyond the Visible

COSTERUS NEW SERIES 196 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, László Sándor Chardonnens and Theo D’haen

Visibility beyond the Visible The Poetic Discourse of American Transcendentalism

Albena Bakratcheva

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2013

Translated by Olga Nikolova Artist Picture on Cover: Theodora Konstantinova Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3556-0 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0831-4 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013 Printed in the Netherlands

Life as Vocation

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For my daughters Theodora and Kossara

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

ix

Preface

xi

I

CORE TENETS OF AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM

Chapter One: The New England Identity of the Term

3

Chapter Two: Puritanism and Eighteenth-Century Rationalism

13

Chapter Three: Unitarianism and Transcendentalism

25

Chapter Four: The Emphasis on Inspiration in Transcendental Aesthetics

37

Chapter Five: Transcendentalism: Poetic-Religious Practice and Way of Life II

65

TRANSCENDENTALISM AND ROMANTICISM

Chapter Six: The New England Horizons of Post-Kantianism: Emerson

85

Chapter Seven: The Vision of the New England Transcendentalist: Thoreau

117

Chapter Eight: The Enchantment of the Voyage Back: Margaret Fuller

135

III

TRANSCENDENTALISM: A CREED OF SELF AND NATURE

Chapter Nine: Traditions and Individual Talent: Emerson and Thoreau Self-Reliance

149

“Thoreau”

169

Chapter Ten: Life as Vocation The Harmony with the Not-Me: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

183

The Artistic Harmony: Walden

199

Chapter Eleven: Homocentrism and Ecocentrism

229

Bibliography

251

Index

261

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During the long period of this book’s inception and development I was helped by several people whom it is my pleasure here to thank. I am deeply grateful to Lawrence Buell for his interest in my work over the course of years and for the intellectual pleasure with which his own work always provides me. I have special debt to Richard Schneider who read the entire manuscript, in all its stages, for his perceptive observations and the bountifulness with which they were rendered. For his extraordinary moral support and generosity I wish to specially and warmly thank Vidar Jorgensen. Thanks are due to Joel Myerson and Leo Marx for the encouragement they have given me. I will always keep with gratitude the memory of Walter Harding and the rewarding and enriching Fulbright year I spent researching in his study. Finally, I owe thanks to my family for their co-operation while I was working on this project.

PREFACE

American Transcendentalism did not introduce a coherent system of aesthetic or theological thought. Neither did it embrace ideas of “pure art”. By bridging wide-ranging intellectualism and an exaltedly poetic worldview, the aesthetic-religious group of the American Transcendentalists, so influential in shaping young America’s cultural identity, retains a unique place in the spiritual and literary history of the United States. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the group constituted the intellectual elite of New England and set the literary and conceptual parameters which for decades remained the indispensable framework of reference for writers as diverse as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The combination of profound religious faith with artistic sensibility, of theological enlightenment with verbal perfectionism, of philosophical awareness with aesthetic daring constitutes the very essence of American Transcendentalism. Ignoring some of these components or isolating them unnecessarily has led some researchers to unjust or even unfounded criticisms: the Transcendentalists have been accused of philosophical and theological incoherence, of eclecticism and lack of originality at the expense of literary accomplishment, of conceptual weightiness which rendered their art “impure”, etc. Such criticisms, however, spanning the gamut of critical biases with a propensity for discovering contradictions, can neither explain, nor invalidate the image of wholeness and perfection which the written oeuvre of the Transcendentalists emanates. And the impression this image has left is undeniable: American Transcendentalism exerted immense power over generations of poets, writers and readers. It seems, therefore, best to examine the American Transcendentalists not as adherents to an intellectual or aesthetic movement, but through the personified categories they themselves invented, namely, the universalized figures of the “poet”, the “thinker” and the “prophet”. Only then can the spiritual and poetic scope of their work be clearly perceived, so that even the apparent nonsystematic nature of

Visibility Beyond the Visible their thinking, enveloped as it is in immeasurable poetic beauty, will begin to emerge as the expression of personal achievement, of noble faithfulness to oneself, and of spiritual elevation. For, in taking as their foundation the Word, the true Word in the biblical sense, but also the Word in its crafted writerly perfection, the most prominent among the Transcendentalists invariably sought – created and shaped – their own selves. The notion of the self as an all-encompassing presence and the gauge of human dignity, underlies all the writings of the New England Transcendentalists. Hence the relevant critical approach should be directed specifically to this comprehensive personal dimension and the ways in which it underpins the Transcendentalists’ significance. Indeed, precisely there is located that which gives American Transcendentalism its recognizable character: the sublime unity of philosophical and religious divergences, achieved through the all-encompassing poetic reach of the creator’s gaze and voice. In order to enter the finely sculpted verbal sanctuary of the New England Transcendentalists, the unique qualities of their thought and artistic achievement, both to a large degree determined by the deeply American character of their spiritual heritage, should be established first: in this American heritage lies the source of their faith, their strength and poetic inspiration, to the extent that the Transcendentalists exalted verbal perfection, that is, the aesthetic power of the word as truth, as the ultimate existential value for the creative individual. These are the terms in which the present investigation posits its task.

PART ONE CORE TENETS OF AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM

CHAPTER ONE THE NEW ENGLAND IDENTITY OF THE TERM I am a transcendentalist ....1

In his lecture “The Transcendentalist”, originally given in Boston in 1842, Ralph Waldo Emerson says: It is well known to most of my audience that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Königsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; and that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary profoundness and precision of that man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomenclature in Europe and America, to that extent, that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought, is popularly called at the present day Transcendental.2

Emerson’s words in this passage are significant for several reasons. On the one hand, he acknowledges his debt to Kant’s philosophy, unambiguously identifying the origins of the term “Transcendental” as it was used at that time in America. Moreover, he addresses an informed audience, which, it appears, hardly needs such a clarification. On the other hand, Emerson’s words suggest a deeply felt resistance to the excessive popularity of an otherwise significant terminology, his displeasure at a passing fashion, which in its superficiality inevitably lead to mistaken identifications. Emerson 1 Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, eds Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, 14 vols, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906, V, 4-5. 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1904, I, 317.

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ultimately does not mention “American Transcendentalism”: in the same lecture he emphasizes that “what is popularly called Transcendental among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842”.3 Significantly, he chooses the personification of the term for the lecture’s title – “The Transcendentalist”. Taking into consideration that for Emerson there was no such thing as “a pure Transcendentalist”,4 or if he existed, he could only have been one of the biblical prophets, it becomes clear that the leading figure of the intellectual elite in New England at the time thought it most accurate to speak of a modern form of idealism, less important in itself than in its personified embodiments. Emerson also deliberately avoids the plural form of the word – the Transcendentalist or the New Idealist blurs the notions of the singular and the plural, blending the individual and the universal into one organic being. Emerson’s attention, in fact, is not focused on the philosophical doctrine itself: he perceives it as imported, as someone else’s. He is attempting, rather, to create an image of being, hence also an image of a certain way of life. It is worth emphasizing as well that Emerson delivered his message in the manner most strongly favored by his contemporaries and his Harvard milieu – not by means of a journal article or an essay, that is, text meant to be read, but in a lecture, through speech meant to be listened to. The fine molding of the image of the American Transcendentalist took place not in front of readers, but in front of a listening audience (the effect, no doubt, amplified by the strong presence and charisma of its creator). Thus, in the old New England tradition of speaking from the lectern – or from the pulpit, which in the context of New England culture at the time meant the same thing – the Transcendentalist was enunciated into being and took his place in the spiritual life of America. The majority in his audience, as Emerson explicitly points out, were familiar with the name of Kant and with his terminology, so the dialogue between lecturer and listeners was posited on the favorable premise of an already established relationship between initiates. Such a relationship was made possible by Harvard University. Despite the fact that “neither the curriculum nor the teaching in many departments had kept abreast of the philosophical, social, or literary movements which had produced the work of Kant, Wordsworth, or Carlyle, there .

3 4

Emerson, The Complete Works, I, 318. Ibid., 338.

The New England Identity of the Term

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were faculty members that actively read, wrote, and talked about their work”. Thus, being “far more interested in nurturing Christian ethics than in pushing specific Christian doctrines”,5 Harvard University in the first few decades of the nineteenth century was creating an attractive atmosphere of tolerance and intellectual and cultural refinement. This spiritual environment gave New England mostly ministers, all of whom were brought up to uphold as their highest, sacred value the mission of the spiritual leader, the Puritan pastor. Imbued with the elated revelatory discourse of Unitarian Christianity, the environment of Harvard influenced the spiritual outlook of the Transcendentalists to an extraordinary degree. That is why Emerson could rely on shared knowledge with his audience: evidently, a title such as “The Transcendentalist” attracted to the lecture hall all those for whom the Transcendental was already in the air, evoking names, concepts and frames of mind, foreshadowing the change, the opening up of New England’s traditional religious culture. By 1842 Emerson was already established as a figure of authority and exemplified the transformation of the religious minister into a spiritual leader of a different kind and with a different stature. Precisely a person of such grandeur was called upon to describe and, more importantly, to name the new American Idealist in his manifestations up to and during the 1840s. Never before in the intellectual climate of New England, had the time been so propitious for the idea of the “New Adam”. The audience was ready to receive the words of their lecturer-leader-preacher-poet. The Transcendental, already an organic animate presence in their spiritual life, started developing its properly New England character. Thus, in accordance with the long American tradition of personification, the Transcendentalist came into existence. Not long after Emerson’s lecture, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his Journal, “The fact is that I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot”, commenting on his refusal to become a member of the Massachusetts Association for the Advancement of Science: I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not 5

Walter Harding, A Thoreau Handbook, New York: New York University Press, 1959, 112-13.

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Visibility Beyond the Visible understand my explanations .... If it had been the secretary of an association of which Plato or Aristotle was the president, I should not have hesitated to describe my studies at once and particularly.6

Also in the Journal, Thoreau notes that he would much rather hold a bird in his affections than in his hand.7 Although the passage shows his strong opposition to the positivism of modern science, it is of interest above all as an act of self-examination. Thoreau’s words engage emphatically with his personal perspective, his own intellectual and spiritual disposition, and not with any acquired set of ideas or doctrines of natural philosophy which have to be defended. Here, as everywhere else, Thoreau is speaking about himself, about his “life without principle”, so radically opposed to the too common life with principles ingrained from the outside. The passage constitutes Thoreau’s own self-recognition as a Transcendentalist. He does not partially identify himself with the formulations of a given philosophical mindset under the name of Transcendentalism. On the contrary, he enacts an existential and deeply personal selfdetermination. The personification of the term “Transcendentalist” reaches with Thoreau its most profound transformation: only a few years after Emerson’s lecture, the American Transcendentalist speaks for himself in the first person and is no longer simply spoken of. What is more, the pronoun I does not refer to a fictional character with a fictional autobiography, but to a real person whose lived autobiography is being recorded in a journal. One of the principal differences between Emerson and Thoreau, which would only widen with time, can be found in their respective definitions of “the Transcendentalist”: the personification in Emerson remains an ideal, a supernal construct, whereas for Thoreau, who was influenced more by Emerson’s character than by his theories, personification meant complete self-identification. Thoreau’s Transcendentalist gave shape and body to the notion by means of his own life. “No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert”, reads one of the most representatively Transcendental parts of Walden: What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how 6 7

Thoreau, The Journal, V, 4-5. Ibid., VI, 253.

The New England Identity of the Term

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well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity .... A man must find his occasions in himself.8

And indeed Thoreau found in himself his “occasions” for being a Transcendentalist. Thoreau’s act of self-examination is revelatory in yet another sense. The notions of “a transcendentalist” and “a mystic” are used as synonymous in the passage. Given the extreme carefulness with which Thoreau treats individual existential premises, it is unlikely that he is referring only to the pietistic mysticism characteristic of American Protestantism from its very beginning. Just as Emerson defines “Transcendentalist” and “Idealist” as interchangeable terms, Thoreau uses “transcendentalist” and “mystic” as synonyms, and both words carry the connotations of something ambiguous, abstract and irrational. Other contemporary sources also suggest that the term “transcendentalism”, as initially used in New England, implied “haziness” – even, rather pejoratively, “outlandishness”.9 There is no doubt that the New England Transcendentalists constituted a heterogeneous group and never established a set of shared objectives. James Freeman Clarke, a member himself, rightly dubs the group “the Club of the likeminded”, adding, “I suppose because no two of us think alike”. 10 It would be, therefore, inappropriate to consider Boston’s intellectual elite from the first half of the nineteenth century in the terms of an organized school of thought with doctrines of its own.11 George Ripley, for instance, takes “transcendentalism” to be the belief in “the supremacy of mind over matter”, while James Freeman Clarke calls himself Transcendentalist simply because he does not “believe that man’s senses tell him all that he knows”; 12 Jonathan Saxton is convinced that “every Man is a 8

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Walter Harding, The Variorum Walden, New York: Washington Square Press, 1963, 83-84. 9 Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1973, 2. 10 John Wesley Thomas, James Freeman Clarke: Apostle of German Culture to America, Boston: Luce, 1949, 130. 11 Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 3. 12 Thomas, James Freeman Clarke, 131.

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transcendentalist”, 13 while Emerson denies the existence of a “pure Transcendentalist”, but believes the Buddhist to be a Transcendentalist. In Jonathan Saxton's understanding, Transcendentalism is “the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining a scientific knowledge of an order of existence transcending the reach of the senses, and of which we can have no sensible experience”. 14 Finally, Orestes Brownson asserts that “Protestantism ends in Transcendentalism”.15 The divergences between the Transcendentalists appear stronger than the possible similarities between them. It is obvious that they differ widely on the subject, to the extent that the definition of “transcendentalism” itself seems to separate them rather than bind the group into a cohesive whole. In this sense, the personification of the notion – much more current at the time than the notion itself, and in many ways more relevant to Emerson’s aestheticreligious construct of the Poet-Priest – came to compensate for what was lacking in the abstract term. “The word Transcendentalism, as used in the present day”, Noah Porter wrote in 1842, “has two applications”: One of which is popular and indefinite, the other, philosophical and precise. In the former sense it describes man, rather than opinions, since it is freely extended to those who hold opinions, not only diverse from each other, but directly opposed.16

Porter’s distinction is significant not because we learn, on good authority, something about Boston’s intellectual life at the time, but because, beyond its ambiguous common usage, there existed a precise and stable understanding of the term. Numerous other sources confirm the veracity of Porter’s observation: in its New England context, “transcendentalism” carried associative meanings which no one questioned and which stemmed from the radical dissatisfaction among members of the Unitarian clergy with the rational epistemology of 13

Jonathan A. Saxton, “Prophesy – Transcendentalism – Progress”, The Dial, 2, 1841, 87, quoted in Henry David Gray, Emerson: A Statement of New England Transcendentalism as Expressed in the Philosophy of Its Chief Exponent, New York: Ungar Pub. Co., 1958, 27. 14 Ibid., 90. 15 Orestes Brownson, The Works of Orestes Brownson, ed. Henry F. Brownson, 20 vols, Detroit: Nourse, 1882-1906, I, 209. 16 Quoted in Gray, Emerson, 29.

The New England Identity of the Term

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John Locke, until then strongly tied to Unitarianism. During the 1830s, under the influence of post-Kantian thought and its interpretations in Goethe, Carlyle, Wordsworth and especially Coleridge, the younger Unitarians of New England began to distinguish, on a par with rational or empirically based judgment, the existence of a higher intellectual faculty giving man access to spiritual truth through intuition: thus the concepts of Higher Reason, “Spirit”, “Mind”, “Soul”, etc. gradually formed the core of the spiritual awakening later to receive the name American Transcendentalism. In other words, despite their wildly varying spiritual and intellectual predispositions, the members of the New England “Club of the likeminded” all commonly refused the idea of trusting only the knowledge which came from sensory experience. As early as 1876, one of the first critics of Transcendentalism remarked: Practically it [Transcendentalism] was an assertion of the inalienable worth of man; theoretically it was an assertion of the immanence of divinity in instinct, the transference of supernatural attributes to the natural constitution of mankind .... Transcendentalism is usually spoken of as philosophy. It is more justly regarded as a gospel .... Transcendentalism was an enthusiasm, a wave of sentiment, a breadth of mind.17

This early evaluation reveals the secret power exercised both by the written word and the lifestyle of the Transcendentalists, at the same time as it evokes an unmistakable impression of perfection, of spiritual elevation and intellectual daring: for if considered as philosophers, the Transcendentalists were too eclectic and the lack of an orderly conceptual framework could – and did – make them subject to serious criticisms. But it is no less obvious that, being fully aware of their eclecticism, they never perceived it as a problem, nor thought of it as a disadvantage. On the contrary, they believed any accomplished system of thought to be spiritually limiting and embraced eclecticism with “enthusiasm and a wave of sentiment”, as “a breadth of mind”. In the same lecture, “The Transcendentalist”, Emerson exclaimed, “Shall we say then that Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia or excess 17

O.B. Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England (1876), rpt. New York: Harper, 1959, 134.

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of Faith; the presentiment of a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive only when his imperfect obedience hinders the satisfaction of his wish?” 18 Thoreau also refused to regard eclecticism as detrimental disorientation of the mind. Quite to the contrary, for Thoreau, the variety of elements pulling thought in opposite directions and making his statements quite often appear contradictory, not only never undermined the inherent dignity of thinking, but – since it lifted the mind towards “visibility beyond the visible”, in his own words – could only enhance concentration and one’s spiritual mobility. The center in Thoreau was always held by the “self”, and since that reflected his own choice, no contradiction could exist. If thought sprang from one’s “self”, as far as it was inherent to one’s “self”, it could not contain contradiction and was by definition coherent and complete. That was why Thoreau called for “simplicity”, for “simplifying”: inner concentration and self-improvement could be attained only by drawing everything to one’s own person. This was the only way to accomplish the individual moral transformation which Thoreau believed to be so important. And just as with Emerson, in the final analysis, the question of Transcendentalism with Thoreau became the question of the Transcendentalist. The group of intellectuals gravitating around Ralph Waldo Emerson consisted mostly of spiritual leaders, people of exception, who, in their calling, felt themselves deeply connected to the great Puritan tradition of spiritual leadership. Hence many critics consider them primarily as religious figures. 19 Another early critic of the brilliant New Englanders asserts, for instance, that “Transcendentalism was a blending of Platonic metaphysics and the Puritan spirit, of a philosophy and a character”. 20 Something is missing, however, in this otherwise incisive observation. No mention is made of “art”; yet, among all other things, the Transcendentalism of New England is extraordinarily poetic. The literary accomplishment of the Transcendentalists is indisputable. Poetry for them was “second only to religion”.21 In fact, they believed poetry and religion to be one 18

Emerson, The Complete Works, I, 320. See Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, New York: Harcourt, 1965. 20 H.C. Goddard, Studies in New England Transcendentalism (1908), rpt. New York: Humanities Press, 1969, 9. 21 Cyrus Bartol, “Poetry and Imagination,” Christian Examiner, 42 (1847), 251, quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 13. 19

The New England Identity of the Term

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and experienced the two as inseparable from each other. For the Transcendentalists, religious and poetic revelation, both attainable only through creative inspiration, partook of the same nature. Within this unique blending of religion, poetry, philosophy, preaching and style of living, which constituted American Transcendentalism, irrationality was not simply the spirit of rejection, merely the crystallized antithesis to an already renounced Lockean philosophy: it was the multi-faceted experience of delight – the delight of artistic creation in the broadest sense of the words. Their eclecticism, then, can be seen as a form of irrationality justified on yet another level for the Transcendentalists. It seems perfectly logical that the inspired exhortations to observe “higher laws” (Thoreau), the glorification of intuition and the desire for an enlightened poetic-religious wholeness (Emerson, Thoreau, Channing), displeased the most conservative among the New England clergy, who believed the Transcendentalists to be awakening “the spirit of darkness” and, more significantly, accused them of “German atheism”.22 It can be concluded, then, that in the context of New England the term “transcendentalism”, given the importance of its personifications and its intense relation to the Puritan tradition, affirmed its irrationality – both with relative clarity, by opposition to certain philosophic-religious formulations; as well as rather more obscurely, through a multiplicity of individual, and individualistic, poeticreligious interpretations. “I was given to understand”, Charles Dickens wrote in American Notes, “that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly Transcendental”. Nevertheless, the Romantic in Dickens, no doubt fascinated by the poetic gift of his contemporaries and their soaring spiritual aspirations, was compelled to add: “If I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist.”23

22

Princeton Review, XII, 71, quoted in Gray, Emerson, 31. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, London and New York: Penguin Books, 2000, 127-31. 23

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CHAPTER TWO PURITANISM AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM The eyes of all people are upon us ....1

The city of Boston is located, both physically and spiritually, in close proximity to the oldest European settlement to endure in New England – Plymouth was founded in 1620 by the English pilgrims on the ship Mayflower. The town of Concord was founded only a few years later, in 1635. These facts have more than purely historical significance. They are at the basis of the profound sense of continuity nourished (almost as an existential necessity) by the Transcendentalists, all descended from families settled in America before 1700. The awareness of being the heirs of a great deed, unique in its kind in the entire history of the human race, was especially productive for them: it bestowed a special feeling of grandeur to their calling as spiritual leaders, preachers and poets. “Our forefathers” was among the Transcendentalists’ favorite phrases and the words expressed emphatically, fostering at the same time, their aspirations towards such nobility of spirit which might correspond to the soaring achievement of the pilgrims’ messianic devotion. Their sense of belonging, both as human beings and as artists and creators, to what was essentially American, even the historical act of founding the American nation – an act of temporal proximity to them which was unimaginable for the Europeans – inspired immeasurable pride in the Transcendentalists and augmented to an extraordinary degree their sense of vocation. For, to ordain themselves spiritual leaders, to elevate the active creation of beauty and spirituality into a cult, could not have been merely the manifestation of individualistic, personal cultivation, but issued forth from the consciousness of national history, proudly perceived as admirable and unique, as properly American. It comes as no surprise that in his essays Thoreau saw 1

John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity”, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1989, I, 477.

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humanity as moving Westward, that is in a direction opposite to the East, to the Old World. This antinomy of East vs. West, Old World vs. New World, foreign to the thinking of the European Romantics of the same period, became for the Transcendentalists a source of confidence, creativity and poetic inspiration, a way to revisit young America’s history in an individualistic (in the Romantic sense), entirely positive way. To an extent, precisely this awareness of a great heritage gave the Transcendentalists license to criticize their contemporaries (Emerson, Thoreau), and to preach and moralize (Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Fuller). In its very essence, Transcendentalism had its roots in the not so distant American past, inexhaustibly drawing life-giving sap from its soil. The past bore the testimony that America was indeed unique and new in the history of humanity, but, more importantly, it transmitted its living memory as a certain kind of spirituality. And this rootedness itself was also unique, as far as it was perceived and continuously emphasized as such. When Thoreau moved to Walden to live in a house made with his own hands, his desire was partly to experience what the first settlers had experienced. Similarly, Emerson’s Poet-Priest was meant to be the equal, in his messianic inspiration, to the Puritan pastors who descended from Mayflower and Arbella. The Transcendentalist disposition towards preaching had its prototype in the old English pilgrims. Finally, the combination of pure spirituality with a desire to shape existence, to make one’s life according to will, had its origins in the very first experience of the settlers on the East Coast: the Concord of the Transcendentalists was the direct descendant of the Plymouth and Concord of the first pilgrims. Particularly revealing is the fact that by the middle of the nineteenth century, as a number of critical studies point out, the words “New Englander” and “son of the forefathers” had become almost synonymous.2 The Transcendentalists often deliberately tried to bypass the American eighteenth century, although the mentality of their times succeeded closely in its steps. They preferred to direct their gaze further backward, to that first century in the history of New England, the seventeenth century, which seemed to exhibit a stronger combination of religious devoutness and worldly pragmatism, only 2

Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 197.

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such a combination being able to guarantee the first settlers’ spiritual, but also purely physical, survival. Of Plymouth Plantation, the first historical document created on New England soil by the Mayflower Puritan pastor William Bradford, constitutes perhaps the best metaphor for the all-encompassing nature of that life-forming Transcendentalist passion for practical sensory experience (Thoreau) and the messianic spiritual creativity of the “thinkers and prophets” (Thoreau, Emerson, Channing) which had the power to transform that experience. Bradford’s descriptions of the communal life of the settlers, who, by virtue of their Puritan faith and the guidance of their spiritual leaders, surmounted all hardships, was to a great extent the model for Brook Farm, the commune founded near Concord in the 1840s under the inspired leadership of the radical Transcendentalist George Ripley. Plymouth was the first settlement, Plymouth Plantation was the first accomplished work of the Puritan newcomers, and Of Plymouth Plantation, glorifying this accomplishment for all generations to come, was the first literary work of the American heritage: the text, inevitably saturated with the rhetoric of oral preaching, established once and for all the singularly American prototype for an insoluble unity between actions and words, life and literature. The experience of the first settlers held its particular attraction for the Transcendentalists not only because it was foundational and passionately spiritual, but also because they distinguished in it a particular poetic quality. The fact of being the successors of such forefathers determined the Transcendentalists’ proud exceptionality, their uniqueness as Americans – the consciousness of which converged in a singular way with the spiritual, aesthetic and artistic currents of the times. The first inhabitants of the coast of New England seemed to offer the Transcendentalists a ready model of life – the truthful life in Nature they most highly esteemed. Moreover, this was a model invented and perfected on native American soil. In the Old World such life would have been impossible – nature there was already too domesticated, too tame, studied and dissected, and therefore was evoking extreme attitudes: either the desire to conquer it and subject it entirely to the human will and intellect (Classicism, the Enlightenment), or the immeasurable admiration which made one prostrate before its beauty (Sentimentalism, Romanticism). Both of these attitudes came from the outside: they belonged to man weaned

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from nature, to man with an existence already taking shape independently, who could then only turn back to nature as a conqueror or a panegyrist; hence the popularity of the theme of “going back to nature” so characteristic of European literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By comparison, the settlers in America had had much less time to attempt the emancipation of human life from its complete dependence on natural processes. From its very inception, the New World had to rely for its survival on the coexistence of man with nature, while stressing, furthermore, the value of such a full life. Precisely this Puritan model of co-existence turned out to be the New England tradition so crucial for the Transcendentalists. Against its background emerged the Transcendentalist notion of a truthful simplicity, of a life both spiritual and beautiful, in the blessed abundance of nature. The Romantic gaze of the Transcendentalists saw in the correspondences between man and nature the possibility for individual fulfillment – for both spiritual and artistic, that is poetic in the broad sense, accomplishment. This became a central theme in Emerson, evident in his earliest big work with the indicative title Nature, and a dominant motif in everything which Thoreau wrote and lived as self-appointed destiny. At a time when America was, in fact, undergoing intense industrialization, threatening to destroy human co-existence with nature, the Transcendentalists were emphasizing the first settlers’ experience, the genuinely American mode of life as a metaphor of resistance, and truthful living as a form of art. “Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?” Thoreau exclaims in “Walking”.3 What was perceived as essentially American – embodied moreover as it was in fascinating imagery – came to show the “right” direction “to the West”, which could lead humanity into the future (“Walking”). That is why “nature” for the Transcendentalists did not refer to nature in general, but to American wild nature. Thoreau’s titles – A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, etc. – demonstrate as much. Equally revealing is his interest in pre-Columbian America, in the life of the North American Indians, who exemplified perfect harmony with that same wilderness. Thoreau, however, just like his fellow Transcendentalists, always preferred the settler, the farmer to 3

Henry David Thoreau, The Essays of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Richard Dillman, Albany, NY: NCUP, 1990, 128.

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the aboriginal inhabitant – “because he [the farmer] redeem[ed] the meadow, and so [made] himself stronger and in some respects more natural”.4 The period of the first settlement provided a two-century tradition for the intellectual and prophetic aspirations of the Transcendentalists; it offered them the prototype for a full and fruitful life in nature, a rich set of native metaphors for artistic fulfillment, the consciousness of a great, proud heritage as chosen people, and, most importantly, the welcomed combination of existential sensibility and elevated spirituality, which on the coast of New England – in the encounter with the new territory’s hostile foreignness – was transformed into a condition for survival. The unavoidable encounter with an inimical, alien nature was from the very beginning perceived as the test of righteousness for Puritan faith, a test of its ability to inspire courage in the face of difficulties. The greater the difficulties, the greater proved the strength and the resilience of the Puritans (William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity, Anne Bradstreet’s poetry, the entire literature of the period unambiguously testifies to such a perception). Hence the singular confidence of the pilgrims of Mayflower and Arbella – confidence proudly taken over by the Transcendentalists – that they had been chosen by God to survive and uphold the true faith in the face of severe hardships. The sense of spiritual mission, of high calling as God’s chosen people, was what set the pilgrims on the path leading from the Old World to the New World. At the end of that path stood the fulfillment of God’s predestination. For, Puritanism, this particular form of English Protestantism, based on the ambition to purify Christianity of all the pompous show and ceremony of Catholicism, was not simply the religion which the Mayflower travelers and their followers brought to the New World. It was first of all the faith which sent them on the long, one-way journey across the Atlantic, so that they could leave behind the “imperfect human institutions” of the Old World5 and build on pristine, pure grounds, a new country, the New Jerusalem. At the basis of Puritanism lies the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, the belief that human salvation was appointed by God for eternity. This 4

Thoreau, The Essays, 132. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, New Haven, CN and London: Yale University Press, 1975, 138. 5

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was precisely how the New England settlers saw themselves, conceiving, at the same time, “the American paradise as the fulfillment of scripture prophecy”. From the very beginning “the Puritans … regarded the country as theirs”,6 preordained for them by God’s will; as early as then began the writing of the “auto-American biography”, to use the felicitous phrase of Sacvan Bercovitch. 7 If every surmounted hardship only confirmed that they were God’s chosen people, the possibility of failure was unacceptable for the American Puritans. Naturally, not all of them survived. Many died during the first cold winters, but their unwavering faith that God’s grace was everywhere, that one could attain grace by oneself, without intermediaries, continued to give them courage and inner force. In the struggle for survival, the Puritan pastors played an extremely important role – not as intermediaries between God and man, endowed with special power, but as true spiritual leaders. Unquestionably, Puritanism represented a productive force and was a source of creativity in the early days of New England’s history.8 In the centuries that followed, it therefore acquired an unrivalled significance as a spiritual tradition, from which the Transcendentalists could draw their profound sense of vocation and of heritage, their spiritual stature and poetic inspiration. Puritanism itself, however, also contained tenets which reconciled it quite easily with the rationalism of the period after the first settlements. This was especially true in America, where by the sheer necessity to survive, the belief in a just but severe God who required constant devotion from His servants, went hand in hand with the practical sense and inventiveness developed in the continuous struggle to resolve new problems. The blending of religious faith and utilitarianism was already a given in the history of Puritan New England when the religious and philosophical ideas of the eighteenth century started being assimilated. Consequently, the Calvinist doctrine of predestination here almost naturally merged with the much more cheerful and optimistic outlook of the Enlightenment. The easy manner in which this happened seems to be directly related to the American experience in the new territory, to the mode of life in close dependence with nature. If the first settlers’ confidence came 6

Ibid., 137. Ibid., 136. 8 See Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America, New York: Scribner, 1965, 158-203. 7

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exclusively from their belief that God had preordained their path as the chosen people (“The eyes of all people are upon us”9), and even if that predetermined role was in essence quite passive (“[we must] walk humbly with our God”), the objective circumstances imposed an opposing tendency – the settlers had to be active and rely on their own resources in order to overcome the hardships presented by their new life. Thus, the ideas of the Enlightenment came to affirm and elevate the existential value of what had become already a matter of necessity in America. At its basis, the European Enlightenment conceived of man precisely as actively present in the world. Thanks to the great scientific discoveries of the preceding century, the eighteenth-century European saw in his ability to understand and apply universal laws the proof of the power of Reason. In other words, man came to be perceived as God’s equal••• •0 Once within the reach of human understanding, the world became “the best of all possible worlds” (Leibniz), and having discovered the same supreme laws which govern the world in the inner workings of his own being, man became capable of governing life, including his own life, to an unprecedented degree. The extraordinary potential of Reason, the awareness of which was clearer than ever, placed the human being in relation to the world in the same position as that occupied by God in relation to His creation or the universe. It followed logically that the Enlightenment would put great value on perfecting morals: a perfect moral order would be analogous to the ideal order of the universe. The greater part of the novels of the epoch treat either mature, practical, skillful characters, whose harmonious inner nature helps them overcome any hardships life may present (Robinson Crusoe); or characters in the process of maturing, who suffer the consequences of their many mistakes only to be richly rewarded when, consciously learning from their experience, they develop the capacity to evaluate and resolve existential dilemmas (Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones). The human intellect, seen as the main attribute of an “inherently good human nature”, became for the Enlightenment the guarantee of confidence and optimism. At the same time, individual growth, the process of adapting to existing conditions, ensured the extremely valued practical 9

Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity”, I, 41. See The Eighteenth Century: The Context of English Literature, ed. Pat Rogers, London: Holmes and Meier, 1978. 10

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ability to deal with life. Humanity began to participate actively in the shaping of its own reality. This rational utilitarian mindset, which justified the domination of Reason over the tangible world, was in its essence compatible with the spirit of Protestantism. Free from all vainglory and ostentation in professing a communion with God regardless of place and without any intermediaries, while promoting healthy, orderly and pious everyday life, Protestantism, in fact, discouraged passivity in favor of mental clarity and expediency. In the case of its extreme forms, such as American Puritanism, the pragmatism of the Enlightenment proved even more adequate, because it gave new shape to the particular blending, already created by the experience of the first settlers, of an extremely simplified worldly existence in the name of God and the purely practical necessity of overcoming a foreign and hostile reality. The great New England Robinsonian adventure avant la lettre had indeed prepared Americans for the ideas arriving from Europe in the eighteenth century – these ideas proved to be not only apt and useful, but also extraordinarily productive in the New World, not least of all because they underlined anew and with even greater force the merits of the Puritan past. “Unlike nations of the Old World, rooted in shadow and mystery, in historic cultures and traditions, the United States had been rooted in the ideas of the Enlightenment”, as Tindall and Shi assert and as most American cultural historians would concur: Those ideas, most vividly set forth in Jefferson's Declaration, had in turn a universal application. In the eyes of many if not most citizens, the “first new nation” had a mission to stand as an example to the world, much as John Winthrop's “city upon a hill” had once stood as an example to erring humanity. The concept of mission in fact still carried spiritual overtones, for the religious fervor quickened in the Great Awakening had reinforced the idea of national purpose. In turn the sense of high calling infused the national character with an element of perfectionism – and an element of impatience when reality fell short of expectations. The combination brought major reforms and advances in human rights.11

The continuity between the late eighteenth century and the early Puritan period was essentially spiritual in the New World. The road 11

George Brown Tindall with David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, New York: W.W. Norton, 1992, I, 477.

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from the ship Mayflower to 4 July 1779 was indeed quite short – one sense of calling metamorphosed into another, not only to finally become a fact of cultural identity, but also to lead to a state-founding historical act with the creation of the United States of America. This was the American “appeal to self-evidence”.12 The Enlightenment notion of active human presence in the world took on a new significance in America. The question for the Americans was not merely to actively live in the world in general (as the idea was commonly interpreted in Europe), but to work actively on the American land already actively redeemed by their ancestors, the land of their own, later to become their own American state – hence with the proud consciousness of belonging to the emerging American nation. America’s Age of Reason drew on the ideas of the European Enlightenment in order to enrich its rather short pre-history, on the basis of which, while preserving the pilgrims’ sense of national purpose, to create new history. For, doubtless, as a French traveler at the time observed: “There [was] no country in the world where the Christian religion retain[ed] a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” 13 Unsurprisingly, the secularism of the Enlightenment never affected the foundations of Puritan spirituality, and was in fact quickly counterbalanced by an incredible religious fervor, which spread all over America from 1800 onwards. At the same time, the leaders of the revolution, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were deists. The most famous document in the history of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, was written entirely in the rationalist spirit of the Enlightenment. The very act of founding the American state at the end of the eighteenth century was also (among many other things) an essentially rational act. Motivated by a logic of cause and effect, the act addressed in a rational and analytical way the necessities of American life and put a logical end to British domination. The rationalism of the Enlightenment, then, had a positive influence on American thought: it compelled the Americans to re-evaluate more precisely their history and experience (Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason); to focus on accounts of personal history and experience (the autobiographies of Franklin and Jefferson); and, most importantly, to construct and 12

See Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, New York: Vintage Books, 1958, 152-58. 13 Tindall with Shi, America, 479.

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record America’s national history and experience (the Declaration of Independence). On the other hand, rationalism’s negative perception, the strong reaction it provoked among Puritans, became the cause of the widespread religious fervor which to a great extent predetermined the emergence of Transcendentalism. In both cases, it must be underlined, the ideas imported from the other side of the Atlantic were adapted to local intellectual needs. The American Enlightenment’s main goal was to build a consciousness of national history and a clear sense of national identity. In accordance with the tradition of the Puritan settlers, American history was comprehended through individual experience and personal exemplarity. Hardly anyone’s life and work showed stronger faithfulness to this genuine American tradition than those of Benjamin Franklin. A true polymath – a scientist, statesman, politician, diplomat, editor, journalist and writer, all in one – Franklin was the American embodiment of the European encyclopedism of the eighteenth century. His vast erudition and his public activity’s astonishing width and variety also bore the stamp of the self-made man, whose intellectual and life achievement was the work of personal determination. The secularism and utilitarianism of the Old Continent, inflected by Franklin’s own thought and by his own particular experience in climbing up the social ladder, seemed to reach in his figure an even more extreme form of worldliness. Combining the deism of the Enlightenment with the practical spirit of the first American settlers, Franklin’s biography gave the formula for authentic success in life – through his life story, which was both a cause and an effect, American history was being made. The attitudes towards Franklin’s formula for success would vary in generations to follow from the positive (most often) to the negative (more rarely), but in any case his impact remained productive: the United States were born out of and grew up with the ideas of the Enlightenment. Although another America existed in the eighteenth century, the America of Jonathan Edwards, who kept till the end his faith in Calvinism (and who, curiously enough, used the great scientific discoveries of the time to defend Calvinism), in the final analysis, the worldly rationalism of the Enlightenment left a profound mark on American Protestantism, which in itself was surprisingly receptive to its influence. Especially welcoming to the strict logic of the Enlightenment proved to be the old Puritan churches around Boston,

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which began to preach rationalist interpretations of the Holy Scriptures, while the remarkable prosperity of Boston “persuaded many rising families that they were anything but sinners in the hands of an angry God”.14 These developments weakened considerably the positions of Calvinism. The Enlightenment’s power of impact on the New World became particularly visible in New England, where the descendants of the oldest settlers on the East Coast, the descendants of those Puritan pilgrims who arrived with a holy mission as the chosen people, succeeded in assimilating the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and expediency, and combined it productively with their pragmatism and existential adaptability, both proven for generations. The New England Puritan church inscribed itself so well within the worldview of the Age of Reason, that its leader, William Ellery Channing of Boston’s Federal Street Church, would remark, “I am surer that my rational nature is from God, than that any book is an expression of his will”.15 At the very heart of New England – in Boston and its surrounding towns – the end of the eighteenth century saw the definitive arrival of the current in American religious thought to become known as Unitarianism. Professing the oneness of God, the inherent goodness of human nature and the prevalence of reason over all established doctrines and beliefs, Unitarianism, with optimism typical for the Enlightenment, maintained that human beings possessed an infinite capacity to do good and that everyone had an equal chance of salvation. Thus, Unitarianism rationally and unambiguously rejected the main tenets of Calvinism. Massachusetts, the New England state with the deepest Puritan roots, emerged in the first decades of the nineteenth century as the center of American religious thought most profoundly marked by the ideas of the mature Enlightenment. Here the continuity between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries followed a natural line of development, while slightly delaying America in its encounter with European Romanticism and its explosive burst of negations. This continuity, according to the tested and proven American model, was first and foremost spiritual. Massachusetts was the cradle of old settler traditions and beliefs, of Puritan perfectionism and proud sense of heritage, of high native spirituality and time-proven practicality – the wave of Enlightenment 14 15

Ibid., 478. Quoted in ibid., 479.

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rationalism met a sense, unique for American history, for a long established way of life which was nevertheless ready to adapt to the new times. Indeed, precisely in Massachusetts the unity of Puritanism and Enlightenment rationalism could crystallize into Unitarianism. And precisely Boston’s Unitarians, all graduates of the then entirely Unitarian Harvard College, constituted America’s intellectual elite of the period. Finally, precisely here, where the unity of religion and rationality was most clearly and convincingly defined, flourished the equally bright and distinctive form of negation to which that same unity had given birth – American Transcendentalism.

CHAPTER THREE UNITARIANISM AND TRANSCENDENTALISM All the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian .…1

A descendant of an old settler family and quite close in outlook to the Transcendentalists, in whose circle he remained for many years, Nathaniel Hawthorne lamented in the Preface to The Marble Faun “the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong .... Romance and poverty, ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers, need ruin to make them grow.”2 Hawthorne saw in the brevity of his country’s history mostly the oppressive impossibility of poetic escape to the enigmas and quiet solitude which a literary antiquity such as Europe’s could offer. Although the Transcendentalists fully shared Hawthorne’s negative attitude towards their contemporaries’ rational and pragmatic mentality, they did not see the country’s short history as a disadvantage. On the contrary, for the Transcendentalists America’s youth was the source of vital force and inspiration. The fact that their origins were in New England gave them a particular advantage – the place’s almost palpable relationship with the devout Puritan forefathers determined the Transcendentalist perception of its exalted, natively American spirit: this spirit did not need ruins to build romances on; lit by missionary fervor, its gaze could wander over the limitless expanse of America’s wilderness and drink its exhilarating vitality. That was also why Emerson’s Nature, from its very publication in 1836, along with “The American Scholar” of 1837, was

1

Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher on moving to Boston in 1826. Quoted in Tindall with Shi, America, 479. 2 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, New York: Dover Publications, 2004, iv.

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accepted by the intellectual elite at the time as America’s spiritual Declaration of Independence. Affirming America’s independence in such new, purely spiritual terms was tightly related to the history of New England’s native spiritual tradition. Profoundly religious in its conception, unimaginable without the Puritan heritage evident in everything it ever created, the New England Transcendentalism often leaned towards radical spiritual liberalism, which at times, as has already been mentioned, brought upon its members serious accusations, including the accusation of atheism. The Transcendentalists distinguished themselves from the religious doctrines inherited by their contemporaries from the preceding century first of all by maintaining that any coherently rational doctrine was unsatisfactory. In its essence, this was a rejection of the supremacy of reason, seen as severely limiting in as far as human nature’s capacities and faculties far exceeded rationality. The Transcendentalist resistance to rationalism, however, remained clothed in strictly religious terms. The New England Transcendentalists never abandoned the religious premises of their convictions, even if their professed attachment to such premises varied considerably. But they overcame the rather obsolete rationalism of the epoch by pursuing their spiritual quest in an entirely unexplored (and unthought-of) direction: poetry. In the new Transcendentalist consciousness, poetry and religion became commensurable, so although predominantly a religious movement, Transcendentalism, as its very first historian observed, was “essentially poetical and put its thoughts naturally into song”.3 As far as any correlation between faith and notions of beauty existed in New England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Transcendentalism transformed this correlation to include a comprehensive poetic quality which retained its essentially religious character, but at the same time distanced itself from the ideas of the dominant religious trend – Unitarianism. New England’s Unitarianism provided the larger intellectual context within which Transcendentalism emerged both as a rebellion against some of its formulations and, to an extent, as an extreme affirmation of tendencies already present in its development. So Transcendentalism rejected energetically, but also radicalized, core elements of Unitarianism, by repudiating everything 3

Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England, 134.

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that could limit the individual in his spiritual and personal aspirations, and by channeling its poetically inspired spirituality into early Puritan (that is, pre-rationalist) revelations, characteristically native New England creativity and verbal craftsmanship of the highest order. A combination of New England Protestantism and Enlightenment rationalism, Unitarianism upheld the oneness of God, rejected the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, and placed reason at the basis of faith and religious practice. These characteristics, Daniel Howe reminds us, inspired the myth that Unitarianism was “corpse-cold”, and was considered as such by its historians for a long time.4 The fact was, however, in the words of a contemporary source from the 1820s, that “all the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian; all the trustees and professors of Harvard College were Unitarian; all the elite of wealth and fashion crowded the Unitarian churches”.5 This source does not merely testify to the great popularity of Unitarianism in the first decades of the nineteenth century; it is also one among numerous documents confirming that Harvard College at the time was entirely Unitarian in spirit. As a result, the intellectual elite of the epoch consisted exclusively of Unitarian ministers and leaders, which gave New England’s intellectual flourishing of the period – a flourishing engendered by the Enlightenment cult of knowledge, but nevertheless only possible in a religious milieu – its idiosyncratic character. Unitarianism’s departure from orthodox Puritan doctrines, inherent in its very premises, issued from precisely this idiosyncrasy – having unreservedly absorbed the utilitarian rationalism of the Enlightenment and that part of its secularism which was compatible with the profession of faith, Unitarianism began to appear as a liberal trend within Puritanism. Hence also its extraordinary attraction for intellectuals. Owing to its confidence in the all-powerful nature of reason, the liberalism of New England’s Unitarians succeeded, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, in liberating religious philosophy from the inhibiting doctrines of Calvinism.6 Consequently, Unitarian clergymen rarely exhibited perfect 4

See Daniel Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 18051861, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970, 153. 5 Tindall with Shi, America, 479. 6 See Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800-1870: The New England Scholars, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969.

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theological coherence, but neither was this their main objective or their main force. As one Unitarian minister-historian admitted: It is difficult to say, out of hand, just what the Unitarian opinion is on any given matter, or what it is that Unitarians believe in …. I am a little impatient that they should ever be judged by their theology, which was so small a fraction of either their religion or their life!7

Apparently, there were other criteria according to which Unitarian ministers judged themselves and according to which they wished to be judged by others. Although the Unitarian movement’s central point of reference was the rejection of the Trinity, the true object of its repudiations was the Calvinist view of human nature.8 Under the influence of the rationalist optimism of the epoch, New England’s Unitarianism accepted the Enlightenment idea of human nature as inherently good and capable of positive change through the rational elimination of false beliefs. That was why Unitarians placed such emphasis on the perfecting of morals. In adopting the anti-Calvinist position on human nature, they claimed that religion’s great task was to encourage the building of character. Even if the Enlightenment tendency to teach practical, worldly morality was less pronounced in New England, education being firmly established within a religious framework, Unitarianism’s departure from the Calvinist canon was explicit and unambiguous. From this perspective, the rationalism of the Enlightenment had a positive effect on American Protestantism. Through the Unitarians it liberalized New England’s theological thought: the very possibility of achieving clear, rational understanding of the laws governing the universe became incompatible with blind faith in the canon’s validity and thus opened new vistas for religious thinking.9 Theological systems erected for the sake of being systematic began to appear outdated in comparison with the clear, hence convincing, Enlightenment notion of a scientifically verifiable, orderly universe and by extension orderly, explicable human nature. Unsurprisingly, theology was of small concern for the Unitarians and they gradually and unobtrusively 7

Quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 24. Hutchison, The Transcendentalist, 4. 9 See The Shaping of American Religion, eds James Ward Smith and A. Laland Jameson, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961, 232-321. 8

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dissolved the boundary between the religious and the secular. But instead of undermining their devout piety, something that, in any case, would have been impossible in the context of Puritan New England, the secular tendencies permeating Unitarian religious thought and practice found expression – a sign of New England’s spiritual maturity – in the rehabilitation of art. Being at the time among the most educated Americans with sophisticated artistic tastes, the New England Unitarian ministers no longer saw art as a threat, but rather as a means of achieving the high moral ambitions of Puritanism. Because of their liberal theology, they drew a much stronger analogy between religious and aesthetic experience than Calvinism would have allowed. As Lawrence Buell points out: “The Unitarians tended to look down upon Orthodox preachers as dogmatic and narrow-minded ranters, while the Orthodox stigmatized Unitarian preaching and writing as hollow displays of elegance which ‘please delicate tastes and itching ears, but awaken no sleeping conscience’.”10 Both sides accused each other of superficiality, but their respective criticisms were based on radically different values: the Unitarians held in highest esteem the anticanonical, while the Orthodox preachers valued above all compliance with Calvinist dogma. The rationally motivated notion of human nature as inherently good and full of potential changed the Unitarian thinkers’ approach to education, which began to favor not strict but affective teaching. “There's no such thing as naked truth, at least as far as moral subjects are concerned”, William Ellery Channing, one of Boston’s most renowned Unitarians, claimed: “Such truth must come to us warm and living with the impressions and affections which it has produced in the soul from which it issues.” Another fellow Unitarian, W.B.O. Peabody, considered “poetry as not distantly related to religion”, but as “alike” in its “tendency, which is to raise the thoughts and feelings above the level of ordinary life”.11 The views of these two Unitarian ministers are extremely interesting and revelatory. Both strongly emphasize the ennobling, purifying effect of the word, which lifts the mind above the everyday, while both are also collapsing the then common distinction between religious and poetic discourse. The leap is astonishing, especially when we bear in mind that it was made within the framework of religious thought and practice. In the eyes of 10 11

Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 25. Quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 26-27.

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the Unitarians, religious and aesthetic perception blended to a point of saturation beyond which only beauty provided the means of attaining spiritual revelation. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the New England Unitarians no longer worried whether “a book [made] vice attractive”. They replaced such religious negativism, characteristic of the popular approach to literature at the time, with the positive expectation that the book may make “virtue beautiful”.12 “Beauty” in this case was clearly understood to mean verbal beauty, that is the extraordinary aesthetic ability of words to affect the reader and lead him or her to spiritual truth. The Unitarians discarded the habitual definitions of beauty as “superficial” or “light”, while acknowledging art’s capacity to enflame the human spirit in its quest for eternal moral values. Whereas the Orthodox Puritans perceived art as hollow decoration, the Unitarians upraised beauty, claiming that it provided a true and effective way to accomplish religion’s most essential tasks – education in solid moral principles, enlightenment and exaltation. William Ellery Channing pushed the analogy between religion and art to the furthest limit imaginable within Unitarianism. He preferred to “inspire rather than to instruct, to celebrate rather than to argue closely”.13 He transformed his sermons into fine verbal edifices whose immense power to affect and inspire came above all from their poetic style. Although Channing was the most radical among the Unitarian ministers, his belief that the religious and the aesthetic were closely related was representative of the movement as a whole. This belief was at the source of the Unitarians’ particular attitude towards the spoken word. The sermon, the act of speaking from the pulpit to one’s congregation, was the main means of expression for all active Unitarian Puritan pastors. As masters of rhetoric with a taste for poetic beauty, and in accordance with the new status given to art, they brought the sermon to perfection. Unitarian preaching provided personal and intellectual fulfillment for these highly educated, knowledgeable, thoughtful and talented individuals. At the same time, as heirs to the old Puritan pastors, as religious and cultural leaders in 12

See William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936, 125. 13 See David P. Edgell, William Ellery Channing: An Intellectual Portrait, Boston: Beacon, 1955, 113-49.

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the old settlers’ tradition, the Unitarians were naturally instrumental in the flourishing of New England’s literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. These first decades became the golden age for religious, philosophical and, most of all, literary periodicals, all of which were edited by Unitarian clergymen.14 The Orthodox clergy played some part, albeit very small, in this literary effervescence, but the liberal Unitarian pastors, whose interests focused more on the nuances of literary expression and poetic style rather than on the dogma itself, excelled in genres, such as the essay, literary criticism or poetry, which were far from typically religious. As highly educated Harvard graduates and open-minded, intellectually enlightened personalities with finely tuned poetic sensibilities, the Unitarians wrote and spoke with eloquence which embodied the synthesis of the religious and the aesthetic and exhibited a characteristic blending of stylistic sophistication, complexity of thought and spiritual depth. But here also lay the limits of the Unitarian attempt to re-establish art as a value – the Unitarians could achieve only as much without breaching the prescriptions of their Puritan faith and without compromising their mission as pastors to encourage high morality. Yet, in the given context, in the New England of the early nineteenth century, the new worldview taking shape could be considered avant-garde: the aesthetic dimension of language, as it was used from the pulpit or on the pages of a periodical, acquired particular importance, creating a culture of verbal refinement which by definition excluded any kind of religious bigotry. The moral idealism of the Enlightenment, its rationally justified optimistic view of human nature, liberated early nineteenthcentury Puritanism’s artistic and poetic potential – religious practice began to integrate readily the affective power of rhetorically refined speech. The same Enlightenment ideas had earlier achieved the complete secularization of European literature, by bringing it as close as possible to “real life” (Samuel Johnson). “The new genres of the new times” (Henry Fielding) – the French philosophical tale and especially the English Enlightenment novel – were indeed new forms meant to respond to a perceptibly changing reality. The novel of the English Enlightenment claimed its place among established literary genres on the basis of its being a testimony to its times – hence it 14

See Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 132.

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almost inevitably took the shape of a dairy, a memoir or a collection of letters (Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Goldsmith, etc.). Profoundly committed to moral edification, the larger part of eighteenth-century English novels propounded entirely secular moral values applicable to everyday life, something evident also in their explicit addresses to the reader. European literature of the time, particularly the literature of the English Enlightenment (no doubt the most influential in New England) built on the traditional distinction between literary and religious discourse, and by maintaining the rationalist predilection for clarity and order, affirmed as a literary merit the teaching of predominantly utilitarian moral principles relevant to ordinary daily existence. The cultural situation in New England at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century was quite different. Those who responded positively to the ideas of the Enlightenment were not professional writers and philosophers, but professional clergymen. The secularism, rationalism and optimistic views of human nature brought about a change in New England’s culture, but only in so far as they made it possible for religious discourse to use art, understood mostly as the art of literature, and rely on art’s affective power in the communication of spiritual meanings. The moral principles being preached were not worldly: they remained religious. Indeed, the new ideas from the Old Continent exerted influence on the religious thought and practice of New England because until the first decades of the nineteenth century, in fact, that was New England’s sole form of intellectual life. Therefore, the Unitarian valorization of verbal craftsmanship, as avant-garde as it was for its time, could not lead beyond the parameters of religious thought, but at the same time, and for the same reasons, it proved decisively important. Despite Unitarianism’s claims to being a “rational religion”, the faith of most of its worshipers was sustained by a vague but ardent core of poetic feeling.15 Highly religious in essence, American Unitarianism, unlike the European culture and literature of the same period, deliberately avoided all contact with everyday reality. The otherworldly, illuminated and illuminating nature of both religious and poetic revelation began to serve as an argument for those among the most 15

Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, 155.

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radical Unitarians who believed the two kinds of experience to be contiguous (or identical). Although they accepted unreservedly John Locke’s views on the empirical basis of human knowledge, and despite being convinced that divine truth, whether in the actual world or in the Holy Scriptures, could be unveiled through rational effort, the Unitarians belonged to a new epoch – no longer the eighteenth century but the early nineteenth. Given their erudition and intellectual stature, they could not remain isolated from the main current of their times, especially the influence of post-Kantian thought, reaching the New World mostly through the works of Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. During the 1830s, the Unitarians gradually came to the idea that above empirical reason there existed a higher human faculty, allowing human beings intuitive access to spiritual truths. The idea very quickly led to new conceptions of creative inspiration; William Ellery Channing wrote: No doctrine is more common among Christians than that of man's immortality, but it is not so generally understood, that the germs of principles of his whole future are now wrapped up in his soul, as the plant is contained in its seed. Consequently, the soul is perpetually stretching beyond what is present and visible ... and seeking relief and joy in imaginings of unseen and ideal being. This view of our nature ... carries us to the very foundation and sources of poetry …. In an intellectual nature, framed for progress and for higher modes of being, there must be creative energies ... and poetry is the form in which these energies are chiefly manifested. Therefore, although poetry may be in a literal sense false, it observes higher laws than it transgresses and far from injuring society, is one of the great instruments of its refinement and exaltation.16

Having accepted that religion and poetry were commensurate, Unitarianism here reached the highest possible limit in its attempt to imagine their eventual unity.17 Only one step beyond that limit was needed: the road lay open for the arrival of Transcendentalism. The limit in question, however, had to be clearly defined before its transcendence could be conceived as a possibility, and Channing’s words in this respect are significant and eloquent. To seek what is beyond the visible, an aspiration inherent in the human soul, “carries 16 17

Quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 37 (emphases mine). See Edgell, William Ellery Channing, 113, 127, 135, 150.

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us to the very foundation and sources of poetry”, to an infinitude invisible to the naked eye (that is empirically inaccessible), beyond and above our perception of everyday life, where religious revelation and poetry overlap. Within these “higher modes of being”, the entrance to which is revealed to the exalted soul by religion, poetry is what channels the release of “creative energies”. With the help of this notion of supra-rational being beyond the everyday, Channing was able to conceive of the correspondences between religious and aesthetic experience, the idea itself being suggested both by the contemporary currents of thought in early nineteenth-century Europe, and by his own refined, highly educated, artistic nature. True to his New England Puritan temperament, however, Channing transformed the idea by taking away the predominantly aesthetic connotations which it carried in Europe, and shifting it, albeit keeping some aesthetic implications, towards a religious register. Thus poetry becomes “one of the great instruments of [humanity’s] refinement and exaltation” – a “great” instrument, but still, only an instrument. Channing seems to be assigning poetry only the role of an intermediary, yet he claims that it “transgresses” laws. In fact, Channing’s thought does not follow a coherent argumentative itinerary: it proceeds, rather, along the meandering path of his own exaltation – and confusion. But that only serves to show to what extent the already full-fledged revolt of European aesthetics and literature against the rationalism of the Enlightenment felt foreign to American thinking. For, as radical as their views became, and as extreme as they were in their conception and valorization of poetry, in the final analysis, the Unitarians remained firmly rooted in the Enlightenment and judged poetry in terms of its utility, even if this utility was measured against the achievement of a high, spirituallyinformed morality. But if the usefulness of literature was often accentuated by the European authors of the Enlightenment with a certain playfulness and light humor, in New England, where the early Puritan sense of divinely-inspired mission was still strongly felt by the Unitarian ministers, the question acquired unidirectional gravity. Moreover, despite their exalted, extreme views on art, the New England Unitarian pastors were not only profoundly devout Puritans, but also typical Yankees with a strong practical sense, inherited from the times of the old settlers. Such a combination had one possible result: poetry could be conceived only as subservient to the pulpit.

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Despite the radical nature of their ideas, the Unitarians continued to proclaim of highest value not the poet’s song but the religious revelation it inspired. This was as far as the Unitarian minister, the intellectual of early nineteenth-century New England, could venture: the Unitarian saw in himself a Puritan pastor whose rationalist views and thinking were liberalized, and who undertook the role of the poet only in order to fulfill better his missionary vocation. However free within the bounds of his calling, he remained a priest-poet. This was entirely comprehensible: the Unitarians, who were brought up in the early Puritan tradition as profoundly religious in their worldview, could see human creation only in a position subservient to that of God. As God’s servants themselves, they could not assign to art any role other than that of an instrument for the attainment of divine truth. As Lawrence Buell observes: ... there was only one way of rescuing art from this position of subservience, short of denying its obligation to be moral or spiritual, which no self-respecting Unitarian would have done in public. The one alternative was to disclaim the specialness of revelation itself, or, in other words, to affirm that the utterance of art is (potentially) just as spiritual as that of the Bible. This is precisely what the more radical Transcendentalists did.18

Such was the only alternative in as much as by presumption, in Puritan New England, still faithful to the spirit of the first settlers, the separation of art and religion, their differentiation into separate domains, appeared impossible even to imagine. To put an equal sign between the two proved for New England of the first half of the nineteenth century the only way to rehabilitate art. This step was accomplished by the Transcendentalists – an enormous step, which, however, was undoubtedly predetermined by the achievements of Unitarian thought. Despite the fact that Orthodox Puritanism was losing ground to Unitarianism, which, in its turn, was giving in to Emersonian Transcendentalism, “art continue[d] to be justified on religious grounds, rather than for its own sake alone”.19 Thus, if for the radical Unitarian pastor William Ellery Channing poetry provided access to 18 19

Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 29. Ibid., 39.

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“higher modes of being”, for Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Unitarian minister who publicly resigned from the church, poetic creation became the proof of God’s presence, so that “whoever create[d] [was] God”.20 A central belief of Emerson and his co-thinkers was the conviction that Christ and the Bible were the sublime expression of divine inspiration, but also that human beings were born to create, and became equal to God by virtue of their talents. Inspiration, therefore, began to play a key role for the Transcendentalists, because by inspiration alone artistic creation could be elevated to a sacred ritual.

20

Emerson, The Journals, V, 341.

CHAPTER FOUR THE EMPHASIS ON INSPIRATION IN TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETICS The best of art is artlessness.1

Everything written by the American Transcendentalists on the subject of the creative process, the artist and art’s influential power circled around the concept of inspiration. For the Transcendentalists, inspiration was both a point of departure and a destination, and ultimately formed the basis of an aesthetic-religious cult. The concept itself was the direct expression of a conviction which can be found at the very core of the Transcendentalist movement and which ensured its relative autonomy – namely, that above empirical rationalism there existed a higher intellectual faculty, intuition, which gave man access to spiritual truth in a much more fulfilling and consummate manner. Although the Unitarians had paved the way for the differentiation between reason and intuition (including their gradation in value), the sharp distinction opposing the two notions was the new element introduced by the Transcendentalists in New England’s intellectual culture: precisely their unequivocal reaction against the rationalism and empiricism of the epoch managed to express most unambiguously the dissatisfaction felt among the Unitarian clergy. Whether this intuitive faculty was called Higher Reason, Spirit, Mind or Soul was of little importance, given that all of these terms implied resistance to the oppressive reign of reason; in fact, the very combination “Higher Reason”, a clear semantic paradox in that it connoted intuitive knowledge, already suggested in what manner traditional rationalism was to be revised (overcome). The Transcendentalist understanding of intuition was quite vague, with definitions ranging from that of inner light or conscience, God’s voice or God’s manifestation in man, to that of impersonal cosmic force, sublime illumination or a powerful 1

Thoreau, The Journal, I, 153.

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universal energy. Despite this vagueness, however (or perhaps precisely because of it), the belief in the supremacy of the irrational among the human faculties helped New England’s Transcendental thinking to explore – by transforming the concept of creative inspiration into one of its principal instruments – the new vistas opened up by Emerson’s equalization between aesthetic and religious experience. The Transcendentalists were actually not the first to acknowledge the power of spiritual intuition. Mystical pietism constituted one of the oldest traditions within American Protestantism. In certain aspects the Transcendentalist view of the creative process was similar to the attitude toward the workings of grace in the Puritan covenant theology. In each case the active power was the spirit – whether that spirit was God or a divine Muse.2 Although this may seem contradictory at first sight, neither view implied passivity on the part of the individual: in each case, attaining illumination from above necessitated inner preparation, which was the individual’s own work. The Pilgrim Fathers were obliged to make extreme efforts to meet the challenges of survival: their faith that God was with them whenever they were overcoming hardships, that they were vindicating His name by their own deeds, implied extraordinary concentration of strength and ability, both practical and, more importantly, creative. Hence the positive confidence of the first settlers that they were called upon to build the New World in the glory of God’s name – confidence nourished in a decisive, emphatically active way by their spiritual leaders, the Puritan pastors. This sense of creative mission the Transcendentalists seemed to inherit directly from their distant Puritan forefathers. What is more, despite the fact that the Unitarian ministers saw themselves as spiritual leaders continuing the great mission of the first Puritan settlers, their rationalist mindset itself was laying the ground for the detachment of the Transcendentalists from their ranks. The Transcendentalists embraced a more immediate sense of being the successors of the great Puritan ancestors and hence, a much stronger sense of special calling. Unitarianism was, in fact, superseded because it was fastened to a limiting and seemingly useless epoch. And in New England there was only one way to make this step forward: by 2

See Perry Miller, “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity”, in Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964, 48-98.

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proclaiming, as mentioned earlier, on the basis of a newly established cult of inspiration, absolutely foreign to rationalism, that art and religion were equally holy. Restoring intuition to its pre-eminent role as the irrational substratum of spiritual experience proved to be a connecting link between the illuminated by divine light first comers from Mayflower and the illuminated by creative brilliance Massachusetts Transcendentalists. Elevating poetry (art) to the level of religion manifested this link, made it visible for the Transcendentalists, because they saw in inspiration a creative force opening before their inner gaze the limitless expanses of a profoundly poetic universe. To conceive of poetry as an inspired and sacred activity allowed the Transcendentalists to see themselves as lineal heirs to the old Puritan pastors, whereby they could feel called upon a mission as descendants of forefathers who were called upon a mission. The Transcendentalist perception of the distant horizon of New England’s early history infused that horizon with an overwhelming poetic quality, which became the source of many of the founding principles of their (twofold) poetic-religious aesthetics. The Transcendentalists’ main argument against Unitarian rationalism was the ardently defended idea that one could have full and direct (not mediated by reason only, hence inadequate) access to the divine: reason appeared insufficient and too imperfect an intermediary when intuition was glorified as the path to divine illumination – creative inspiration. Emerson saw a proof of God’s presence in the very act of creation, in the creative process itself. This Romantic-religious belief in the possibility of an unmediated communion with God clearly points to early Puritanism. The connection with the forefathers, in fact, runs even deeper: just as for the old settlers divine revelation was the supreme accomplishment of individual experience,3 for Emerson personal commitment was at the heart of the creative process. “Whoever creates is God”, the leader and inspirer of Boston’s Transcendentalists asserted, and made the statement unambiguously clear: “whatever talents are, if the man create not, the pure efflux of Deity is not his.”4 Creation represents both the premise and the guarantee of divine revelation, itself possible only through ceaseless spiritual work on the part of the individual. The 3

See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, New York: Macmillan, 1939, Chapter X. 4 Emerson, The Journals, V, 341.

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pilgrims were creating a mode of life in the New World; two centuries later, the Transcendentalists were creating art – the analogy is evident and, predictably, in both cases, spiritual autobiographies were major forms of literary expression. The parallels with New England’s religious past were not only present, but consciously sought after, as demonstrated by the fact that in defining the creative process the Transcendentalists used biblical – and not any other – language. Lawrence Buell rightly observes that: However much it relies for its expression on such literary jargon as genius/talent, imagination/fancy, and classic/romantic, their theory of creativity begins, like the concept of the poet-priest itself, with their intuitions about religious experience. Inspiration did not mean for them a great idea for a poem or story, so much as the experience of that truth or Reality of which the finished work was to be the expression.5

For Emerson, Christ and the biblical prophets were “divine bards”, who spoke in a state of “jubilee of sublime emotion”, just as his poet was a “newly-born bard of the Holy Ghost”.6 The biblical language of the New England Transcendentalists proved (although to different degrees, according to their different preferences and beliefs) to be the means with which to elevate poetry in its revelations and affective power to the status of the Christian religion, and consequently to speak of the Bible as sublime poetry, and of poetry – as sublime biblical truth. This commensurability of poetry and religion, achieved through creative inspiration, unambiguously shows, among other things, the Transcendentalists’ (Puritan) faith in the infinite possibilities opened up by the idea of an unmediated communion with God. Thus, Emerson’s public resignation from service as a pastor of the Boston parish (1832) in order to devote himself freely to contemplation and writing, becomes comprehensible and can be seen as the most important symbolic act in the history of American Transcendentalism. Following Emerson’s example, most of the Transcendentalists who remained active ministers in the Unitarian 5

Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 58-59. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, ed. Robert D. Richardson, Jr., New York: Bantam Books, 1990, 120.

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church began to have misgivings about the institutional aspects of religion and as a result concentrated their attention on literary work (like Channing). At the same time, those who, like Henry David Thoreau or Bronson Alcott, were never ordained ministers, invariably imbued their writings with the pathos of preaching. What is more, the key periodical of the Transcendentalists, The Dial, bore the very indicative subtitle “A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion”. Quite clearly, in drawing an analogy between religious and aesthetic experience, in equating poetry and religion, the Transcendentalists did not simply elevate the poetic to the highest possible status for their time and milieu; they went further, removing this newly established relationship from religious practice and placing it within the sphere of pure spirituality, which they increasingly conceived of in literary terms. Spirituality was thereby transformed into an entirely individual experience. For, inspiration was an illumination from above, given to spiritually and creatively endowed persons: although in theory they proclaimed inspiration to be within everyone’s reach, for the Transcendentalists only the Poet, with capital P, could become God’s equal. Thus the Transcendentalist resigning publicly from the church did also publicly acknowledge that creativity pertained to the individual, that divine service belonged now to the domain of individual poetic-religious practice. If the Unitarian minister was first and foremost a priest, a pastor, and incidentally a proponent of verbal craftsmanship, the Transcendentalist was above all a poet, a creator, and only in the second place – a priest. Preaching continued to play a part – a constant and vividly discernible part – in everything the Transcendentalists wrote and in all of their orations, informing their often perfectly wrought poetic style, but now it functioned outside the religious institution. In a sense, for the Unitarians the pulpit subordinated art to its own purpose, whereas for the Transcendentalists the opposite became true, art integrated the function of the pulpit. This was done entirely on the premises of personal aesthetic-religious experience as the product of inspiration, itself attainable solely through the individual’s spiritual illumination. The Transcendentalists began to transform artistic creation into a professional activity. This transformation began in a unique New England manner: intuition was valorized at the expense of empirical knowledge, while inspiration and creativity were elevated into a cult and attributed exclusively to the

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personal experience of the chosen one, the Poet, the man of spirit who continued being a spiritual figure but was no longer a servant of the church. Conceived as individually experienced spiritual revelation which nourished creativity, inspiration gave the Transcendentalists the means to affirm the truthfulness of a direct, unmediated communion with God. And yet again, the continuity between Transcendentalism and early New England Puritanism is evident: the first Puritan settlers did not feel it necessary to build churches in order to exercise their faith, but led by their pastors, felt called upon to lift their spirits unto God regardless of place; in a similar manner, the Transcendentalists no longer needed the pulpit in order to preach the illuminations of their poetic spirituality. Although established beyond doubt, and repeatedly underlined by the Transcendentalists themselves, the analogy with early Puritanism should not be over-interpreted: the Transcendentalists truly belonged to the nineteenth century, they were heirs to the intellectual currents of the eighteenth century, and were all highly educated individuals, who borrowed freely from the cultural and spiritual heritage of the world. Yet, the fact remains that the strongly visible continuity with Puritanism, the tradition with the deepest roots in New England, confirms in a unique New England manner a very important aspect of Transcendentalism – notably, its faith in a direct, personal communion with God, which implies no less than faith in purely human, natural perfection, already understood by the Transcendentalists to be an irrational human faculty allowing individuals to receive inspiration and to create. Thus, for Emerson the poet is an inspired demi-god, who, in creating, re-enacts the creation of the world. And inversely, Christ and the prophets are not figures of exceptional authority, but poets, whose words must be perceived as the inspired speech meant to lift us to the heights of their own vision, and not merely as a set of truthful instructions which we must follow. Emerson interprets Christ’s affirmation that he is divine and that through him we see God precisely along these lines. But Christ’s words, Emerson adds, have unfortunately been distorted by “the Understanding”, which “caught this high chant from the poet’s lips” and transformed it into the dogma that Christ was God: The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his

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principles, but on his tropes .... Thus he was a true man .... By the same token we should not worship his person but respect ourselves.7

These early statements of Emerson are extremely significant. He opposes the doctrines of reason, blaming them for the continuous misinterpretation of Christ’s words and those of the prophets. Such misinterpretation, according to him, implies an inability to grasp the poetic revelation of holy truth: hence his dissatisfaction with contemporary religious thought and practice (which also motivated his retirement from priesthood). It may seem, at first sight, that Emerson is using the analogy with poetry pejoratively, as if his aim is to denigrate the authority of traditional Christianity: the words of the prophets are pure poetry, they are meant to inspire us, not to exercise authority over us. However, while he insists on reading the Holy Scripture as literature which can inspire, Emerson believes in the advent of a “new Teacher”, a modern priest-poet, and of new bibles, more perfect, written by inspired modern men. Although very exalted, Emerson’s Address before the graduating class of Harvard follows a perfectly coherent trajectory of thought: the denigration of poetry due to the prevalence of reason blinds us to the true message of the Holy Scripture, which is revealed precisely in the Scripture’s profound and inspiring poetic quality; to grasp its poetic meaning implies achieving direct contact with the divine truth, through the sublime unveiling of our gaze – through poetic-religious inspiration. That is why such supremely truthful spiritual state can lead to the creation of new bibles: Emerson brings the synthesis of art and religion to its purest extreme. The outraged response from Boston’s Unitarian ministers came immediately. They accused Emerson of undermining the very idea of Christian revelation’s exceptional authority, even of attacking the foundations of the Christian faith. Yet, although it appeared excessively provocative and audacious, Emerson’s 1838 speech at Harvard did not generate only predictably negative reactions among the Unitarians. A conventional Unitarian like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow commented on the event: The Reverend Dean Palfrey said that ‘what in it [the speech] was not folly, was impiety!’ Oh! After all, it was only a stout humanitarian 7

Emerson, The Complete Works, I, 129-32.

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If a deeply pious man, a conscientious parishioner and an entirely consistent moralist writer such as Longfellow could appreciate Emerson’s proclamations, then, in reality, as mentioned earlier, the intellectual milieu of New England at the time was already awaiting Emerson’s poetic-spiritual radicalism. Besides, Longfellow’s interpretation of Emerson’s speech goes beyond the Unitarian binary of piety and impiety (apparently inadequate to Emerson’s oration) and, in fact, gives it the proper reading. Since humanitarianism includes the idea of Christ as a common mortal man, and since ethically it relies on the belief that human beings are capable of selfimprovement through their own efforts, Longfellow’s judgment, apart from revelatory in as far as it came from a Unitarian, was perhaps the first in America to discern the true note struck by emerging Transcendentalism. We need only add the poetic element to this interpretation, because, for Emerson, Christ was indeed “a true man”, but he was above all a bard whose words were spoken in a state of “sublime emotion” or inspiration; because not merely contemporaries, but “inspired contemporaries” could write the “new bibles”; because the human and the divine could only meet in the sublimity of creative inspiration. In this sense, for Emerson – and for all the Transcendentalists influenced by him – inspiration surpassed the notion of artistic mastery or the idea of a great work of art, and overlapped with the attainment of sublime truth, while remaining, at the same time, an individual accomplishment of the chosen by God creator, who became God’s equal in the act of creation. Hence the specificity of the Transcendentalist notion of direct communion with the divine, fully possible only through the individual’s experience of creative inspiration, through intuition lifting the mind and opening one’s eyes to faith’s poetic essence. And hence the great Emersonian idea, which influenced the intellectual climate of Massachusetts well into the mid-nineteenth century and even later – namely, the idea of the poet-priest, which personified the Transcendentalist emphasis on creative inspiration. 8

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Andrew Hilen, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966, II, 87. See also Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 33.

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This idea, already emergent in The Divinity School Address, dominates everything Emerson wrote in the succeeding years: “when we speak of Poet in the great sense”, he suggested several years later, “we seem to be driven to such examples as Ezekiel and Saint John and Menu with their moral burdens; and all those we commonly call Poets become rhymesters and poetasters by their side”.9 Emerson’s formulation here is clearly twofold. Spiritual vision is that which elevates beautiful language to its high status; beautiful language in itself is nothing if void of spiritual (and moral) truth; only in the combination of the two can the sublimity of the aesthetic-religious experience be possible. Because this experience is understood as a strictly individual achievement in the process of creative inspiration, Emerson’s Poet becomes a reconciler, perfect both in terms of inspiration and expression (“The Poet”). The new Poet has to be simultaneously a Seer and a Sayer in order to justify the capital P with which Emerson invariably writes his title – hence the addition of the second P, that of Priest. Being inspired to create and being inspired by creation therefore become inseparable, because the individual experience of poetic-spiritual illumination overflows into magnificent language, meant to inspire in its own turn. The Unitarian pastor in Emerson could not disappear, and had no reason to disappear: he simply exchanged the institutional pulpit for a metaphorical one. Such a gesture may at first sight seem insignificant, but it proved decisive in the spiritual life of New England at the time. Although not all Transcendentalists accepted unreservedly the idea of the SeerSayer Poet-Priest, its advantages were unquestionable: it was both a continuation of and a step beyond Unitarian thought and practice, without leaving the bounds of religion (something absolutely unimaginable, given the power of New England’s Puritan tradition); yet it also formulated the possibility of separation from the church as institution, whereby the poetically endowed individual could begin to inhabit his own poetic-spiritual domain (as already discussed in another connection). This step, in fact, proved to be the first towards the professionalization of writing literature. (Even if the idea remained more of a theoretical formulation rather than something applicable in reality, there is no doubt that an entirely professional poet like Walt Whitman owed much to Emerson’s concept of the Poet-Priest.) 9

Emerson, The Journals, VIII, 229.

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The two-dimensional nature of Emerson’s idea is particularly salient in the comparison he draws between Shakespeare and Swedenborg in Representative Men (1850). “For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique”, Emerson observes, “his power of expression is incomparable”.10 “But he had no conscious purpose beyond beauty and amusement”,11 Emerson thinks. Swedenborg, by comparison, was a seer with the vision of a great poet, but his mind was wrapped by its “theologic determination”, and so his work was often dull and had no beauty. What is needed, Emerson concludes, is a “poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle, with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration”.12 Emerson’s idea of “reconciler” is charged to the maximum degree: it can crystallize only within the perfectly clear understanding of art and religion’s oneness in essence, attainable through the sublime illumination which the talented individual, the God-like Man creating, experiences on a profoundly personal level. Hence Emerson’s choice of the idea’s personification. If examined in greater depth, Emerson’s twofold model reveals another of its characteristic subtleties: the Poet-Priest has the ability to reconcile tendencies within his own visions and his own expression; he is a seer and a sayer in so far as he himself has the faculty to be both at the same time. Thus creative inspiration, illumination from above, corresponds to the Poet-Priest’s personal spiritual-creative capacity, which needs to be supreme, perfect. Then again, as far as this capacity expresses itself in creation, it is also outbound. Being a Priest, Emerson’s Poet creates for others, speaks to others. His song has a message, moreover – a great message. “The highest originality must be moral”, Emerson is convinced, “the Bible and other sacred scriptures are the only really original books, compared to which even Shakespeare is derivative”.13 Yet, “inspired contemporaries” can also create new bibles. Thus, Emerson’s Poet-Priest has the ability to create inner unity, reconciling a perfect vision with perfect expression, but also an outer one, because, like Christ and the biblical prophets, like the old Puritan pastors, his double talent conforms with his 10

Emerson, The Complete Works, IV, 212. Ibid., 217. 12 Ibid., 219. 13 Ibid., 357. 11

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missionary calling to proclaim moral truth, to lift human spirits with aesthetic-religious revelations. That is why he is doubly the Chosen one – in combining talent with missionary calling; that is why he is required to see and to speak, but also to act – always with inspiration, so that his gift may impress upon men its sublime moral message. No wonder Emerson looks in vain for the Poet-Priest he describes.14 No wonder also that Emerson’s twofold model, more or less accepted by the Transcendentalists, elicited a wide gamut of opinions in their circles – opinions which varied in favoring either of its two components, although remaining within the overall framework it provided. Those among the Transcendentalists who nourished great respect for traditional Christianity expressed their reservations towards what they considered beautiful but rather frivolous in Emerson’s theory – the strong emphasis on poetry. “Not as a scholar, not with a view to literary labor, not as an artist, must he go out among men – but as a brother man”, thus William Henry Channing criticized the excessive role of art in the notion of the Poet-Priest.15 Even more revealingly, when Emerson tried to encourage two of his closest followers, Bronson Alcott and Jones Very, to turn their missionary inclinations into literature, he met with their point-blank disagreement – Alcott considered Emerson to be “too narrowly literary in his interests”.16 For other Transcendentalists, by contrast, too limiting was the prophetic role of the Poet-Priest. Margaret Fuller, for instance, felt that Boston culture was insensitive to “the poetical side of existence”, to poetry not “in its import or ethical significance, but in its essential being, as a recreative spirit that sings to sing”.17 Similarly, William Ellery Channing and Henry David Thoreau were by temperament more artistic than was Emerson. Although he identified strongly with the prophetic Transcendentalist spirit, Thoreau perceived it much more as a burden than as a liberating, free valence: “What offends me most in my compositions”, he records in his Journal, “is the moral element in them”.18 And John Sullivan Dwight, 14

Ibid., III, 37. Quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 41. 16 Bronson Alcott, The Journals of Bronson Alcott, 2 vols, ed. Odell Shepard, Boston: Little, Brown, 1938, I, 90-91. 17 Margaret Fuller, “Entertainments of the Past Winter”, The Dial, 3 (1842), quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 42. 18 Thoreau, The Journal, I, 316. 15

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convinced that religion was impossible without music, retired from service as acting minister and devoted his life to music criticism. Evidently Emerson’s idea of the Poet-Priest exerted such influence on the Transcendentalists that to remain indifferent to it became impossible: however widely the opinions oscillated between messianism with an element of artistic ambition and artistic ambition with an element of messianism, the idea poised itself at the absolute center of the Transcendentalist movement. It suffused everything the Transcendentalists wrote – whether in their works and journals or on the pages of their magazine The Dial. And here lies one of the most important reasons, perhaps the main reason, for Emerson’s leading role among New England’s Transcendentalists: not one among them, at any time, considered questioning Emerson’s position at the head, even if their characteristic obscurity otherwise prevented them from being excessively consistent. In fact, the idea of the Poet-Priest itself is to some degree obscure and does not have the elaborated, clear outline which a coherent aesthetic doctrine would require, simply because it did not constitute a part or a category within a consistent system of thought, but was a mirror image, reflecting the characteristics of what it personified – creative inspiration. Just as the Transcendentalist understanding of creativity based itself on intuitions about the essence of religious experience, the idea of the Poet-Priest, being the expression of that understanding, followed in Emerson’s formulations the irrational impetus of different states and degrees of inspiration. That is why the more Emerson complained in his journals of lack of inspiration, the more exalted and rhetorically overpowering became his celebration of the inspired Poet-Priest in his other works. As if the more inspired the rhetoric of the Transcendentalist veneration for inspiration, the higher its value became in the Transcendentalists’ attempts to grasp intuitively the essence of creativity as a poetic-spiritual illumination, as inspired, unmediated communion with the divine. It is an unquestionable fact that every time they began writing about the enlightened realms of inspiration, the Transcendentalists, after Emerson’s fashion, were increasingly taken with the perpetual search for a better, fitter expression. Because words, all of the Transcendentalists felt, had to correspond to the essence of inspiration and this essence for them was intuitive, profoundly irrational, impossible to grasp through simple logical operations. Given that the

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poetic-religious revelation attained through inspiration allowed the man-creator direct communion with God, the only possible way to communicate such revelation was inspired language, which attempted to re-create – not analyze – its illuminated sublimity. “Whoever creates is God”, but, at the same time, he is a Poet-Priest who shares with his fellow human beings and leads them towards supreme moral truths; he is “a seer” but also “a sayer” with a sublime message – hence his speech becomes the inspired embodiment of his aestheticreligious experience. Since spiritual experience is something entirely irrational, even, as Emerson writes in Nature,19 the negation of all logic and reason, it cannot be discussed in the language of analytical thought. All latent potential of words has to be put into use in its expression. That is why in Nature Emerson calls not only for “an original relation to the universe”, but also for an original use of language.20 The language of inspiration, just as inspiration itself, had indeed to be irrational and unmediated by any conventions of reason. The Transcendentalists, then, could harness their inexhaustible eloquence in trying to recapture, again and again, the originality in question, an eloquence which provided meanwhile the rich spectrum of definitions for inspiration: from the feeling of bliss overwhelming us in the loveliest moments of our life to the passionate yearning to relive this bliss; from the delight arising from belief in the divine essence of human nature to the exhilaration of an unexpected illumination, and so on and so forth. Furthermore, the excessive variety in the attempts to give verbal expression to inspiration not only distinguished the Transcendentalists as a whole, and not only pointed to differences between them, but characterized also each one of them individually, as it encompassed the various moods, affects, states of mind and spiritual uplifts of a given writer. And on every occasion a new expression was sought, so that the moment which intuitively revealed one or another spiritual truth could be communicated in all its freshness – or at least such was the assumption. That was why it seemed perfectly natural to Emerson to see in the creative process a divine mystery, but to maintain in his theoretical writings that the essential characteristic of a genius was his extraordinary verbal ability: if the artist was not merely

19 20

Emerson, Selected Essays, 25-26. Ibid., 29.

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a spectator, but a creator,21 “a seer” and “a sayer” at the same time, a Poet-Priest, then the gift for poetic-religious inspiration implied, by and in itself, the gift for poetry – which was also twofold. The PoetPriest’s speech is simultaneously the Word as revelation and poetry; it is felt as an organic part of the intuitive, irrational nature of spiritual experience and so exhibits the same inherent characteristics. The very idea of the Poet-Priest posits a priori his expressive creativity, to the extent that it coincides with divine illumination; in the transport of inspiration, the Transcendentalist mind almost unwittingly identifies inspiration with verbal ability. Therefore, Emerson, who believed the creative impulse to be entirely unpredictable and who assigned almost cosmic dimensions to inspiration, never found it necessary to pay special attention to verbal mastery as such – it was simply assumed in the aesthetic-religious creativity of his Poet-Priest. Although, in their sober moments, many Transcendentalists considered the necessity of discipline in writing, in the very process of giving verbal form to spiritual revelation, and despite making serious efforts in their own work to construct the perfect arabesque of words, when swept in the excitement of their great idea, the Transcendentalists knew indeed no limits in the amount of linguistic energy expended in the praise of inspiration, so that they became simply unable to distinguish it from the process of its transformation into writing or speech. Besides, the Transcendentalist idea of inspiration excluded the possibility of focusing one’s attention specifically on verbal craftsmanship: the idea was so overpowering that it blinded the eye to any poetic techniques or any notion of creative discipline; but also, more importantly, the emphasis on the sacred nature of inspiration made any conscious effort to understand its manifestations and particularities appear sacrilegious. Paradoxically, although only at first sight, the theoretical logic of Transcendentalism made obscurity its natural element: by placing value on intuition, on the imagination and irrationality, it proclaimed the anti-analytical in any form to be of exceptional merit because of its assumed correspondence with the divine nature of spiritual experience. In the aesthetic-religious aspects of his creativity, the Poet-Priest was both “a seer” and someone who transformed visions into words – the two roles were considered 21

Emerson, The Complete Works, VIII, 42.

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inseparable in as far as they were assigned through divine illumination. Since the Poet-Priest was not only a theoretical construct for the Transcendentalists, but also, to a great extent, a figure with which many of them personally identified, they chose to speak about his twofold nature, attainable through creative inspiration, in the obscure terms of the sublime mystery called creative process. In their most inspired theoretical formulations of inspiration, the Transcendentalists, in fact, extolled a kind of automatic writing. “There can be no will for composition”, Alcott insisted: “The spirit within is the only writer.”22 Orestes Brownson claimed that “the poet does not seek his song, it comes to him. It is given him.” And Jones Very, a radical with strong messianic inclinations, even professed to value his poems “not because they were his but because they were not”.23 Emerson, who had enthused his followers with the idea, agreed completely on this point. “A work of Art is something which the Reason created inspite of the hands”, he asserted 24, adding elsewhere: “A work of Art lasts in proportion as it was not polluted by the willfullness of the writer, but flowed from his mind after the divine order of cause and effect.”25 Clearly these extreme views reduce the author’s role to a certain receptivity to the unpredictable, uncontrollable revelations of the spirit. Thus the divergence between the gift of intuition and the rational faculty is pushed to its greatest; the author, seemingly void of any creative initiative, becomes an intermediary, a messenger, to whom the work of art is dictated. At first sight, these statements entirely contradict the Transcendentalist conception of the creator who becomes God only while actively creating. But the personification of inspiration, the Poet-Priest, is missing in such statements, and the dominant notions remain impersonal. Without actually searching for logical coherence where it was avoided by conviction, we may observe here a different accentuation within the same conceptual pattern – the New England Transcendentalists looked for every opportunity to affirm the divine, sacred nature of inspiration, of the creative process and, by extension, of the work of art itself. The God-like creator who attains direct contact with divine truth in the sublimity of his aesthetic-religious 22

Alcott, The Journals, II, 206. Quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 56. 24 Emerson, The Journal, V, 206. 25 Emerson, The Complete Works, XII, 466. 23

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experience, has not been done away with. But the emphasis here falls on the mystery, the enigma of this same aesthetic-religious experience, the irrational unknowability of creative inspiration. In suggesting that the creative act consists, in a sense, in writing down what is dictated from above, the Transcendentalists develop another aspect of their concept (their intuition) of the equality between religion and art: it is unacceptable, even sacrilegious, to speak of art, of literary composition, as spiritual revelation on a par with and inseparable from religious revelation in the terms of authorial discipline or poetic technique and conscientiousness. The mystery of inspiration is incompatible with the premises of artistry. As the author of the first thorough critical study of American Transcendentalism, F.O. Matthiessen, observes, “The Transcendentalist notion of art as inspiration is in sharp opposition to the idea of art as craftsmanship”.26 It is necessary here to make a distinction, however: this “sharp opposition” is evident largely in theory – whereas, especially in the case of Emerson and Thoreau, in practice, in their critical and poetic work, the Transcendentalists were extremely self-demanding, something to which numerous documents attest (compare the arduous efforts both Emerson and Thoreau put into transforming their diary notes into essays, articles and books). Nevertheless, the situation was different with their less talented fellow Transcendentalists. It is well known that Jones Very and William Ellery Channing refused the editorial suggestions of Emerson; in the urge to record every spiritual modulation of their souls, Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller also left many texts unpolished; John Sullivan Dwight met with not a few disappointments in his career as a minister because he applied literally the principle of spontaneity and preached extemporaneous sermons; and William Henry Channing was famous for his good improvised speeches, but his written works remained rough and unbalanced.27 The Transcendentalists’ own experience shows – often in a painful manner – that being self-demanding is part and parcel of being talented, as well as that overestimating theory and applying it uncritically to the practice of speaking or writing serves only as a kind of compensation. In the particular case, however, something else was also making more

26 F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, London: Oxford University Press, 1941, 25. 27 See ibid., 25-30.

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attractive the literal application of the principle of spontaneous, unedited speech. Yet again, the commensurability of art, notably the art of literature with religious categories implied that the more ingenuous and unpremeditated the flow of words, the better it expressed the spiritual revelation it tried to embody. The aesthetic value of language was seen to reside precisely in such correlation and so every subsequent interference on the part of the writer was perceived as desecration. Built on the concept of identity between religious and aesthetic experience, the Transcendentalist theory of inspiration implied – or perhaps, even demanded – that it should be directly applied, down to the level of verbal expression. Yet talent asserted its own requirements. Although a brilliant theorist, when Emerson edited and rearranged, as if in a verbal mosaic, the notes from his diaries into lectures and essays, he proved to be possibly the most unspontaneous in his method; moreover, he built a reputation as a demanding editor and a good operative critic (who, on top of everything, often revised his own judgments). One could claim that the opposition between art as expression of aesthetic-religious inspiration and art as craftsmanship in Emerson took the most radical form – in his theory, but also, in the gap between his theory and his practice. The notion of creative inspiration as a sacred mystery created its own inner necessities, but so did the ultimate satisfaction in a work well finished. Similarly, Henry David Thoreau, convinced that “the best of art is artlessness”, the absence of craft in the spontaneous overflow of inspiration into speech or writing, felt also compelled to say, “we blunder into no discovery but it will appear that we have prayed and disciplined ourselves for it”.28 Clearly, Thoreau saw the individual’s active creativity, necessitated by inspiration, as a kind of purposeful self-discipline; this view almost naturally led to the same attitude towards writing. Thoreau’s universally acknowledged masterpiece, Walden, for instance, was the poetic synthesis of eight years of work. In reality most Transcendentalists (apart from the above-mentioned exceptions) demonstrate – beyond the rhetoric of inspiration – the same practical sense of writing’s value as that characteristic of Thoreau and Emerson. Although to a varying degree, they kept reiterating with exaltation their faith in inspiration, continuously 28

Thoreau, The Journal, IX, 53.

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searching for new ways of expressing and transmitting the uniqueness of every flight of inspiration, but, at the same time, when it came down to verbal particulars, they could not resist the desire to give their writing a fine and elaborate shape. “They were all enamored of the idea of inspiration, and hastened to ascribe as much as possible to it, even the literary grubwork”, Lawrence Buell observes, adding in conclusion: But as refined and sensitive people, they demanded satisfaction from the finished product. Discipline, then, was a hidden but genuine part of the Transcendentalist aesthetics.29

We need only add here that discipline was “hidden” because the Transcendentalists’ faith in the mystery of the aesthetic-religious revelation and its verbal expression required it to be hidden, so that the value of art could be measured against its artlessness. The actual manifestations of this discipline, however, are in complete accordance with the sense of missionary calling, and by extension – of the high responsibility of the Poet-Priest. Because the Poet-Priest was not simply an ideal, but also a supreme form of selfidentification for the Transcendentalists, a sacred vocation, which demanded self-work (in proportion, of course, to individual talent). Self-work or creative self-discipline could also be integrated into the theory of the Transcendentalists, especially when the personifier of inspiration was concerned. While it revealed itself in the practice of writing, in theory it remained hidden because it implied analytical desecration of the absolute, intuitive nature of creation, a sacrilegious encroachment over the inherent unknowability of the aestheticreligious experience, of inspiration. Thus literary craftsmanship, the careful molding of the verbal material into finely sculpted shapes, entered Transcendentalist theory “in sharp opposition” (Matthiessen) to the idea of inspiration, but it naturally established itself as a practical necessity for the most talented representatives of the movement. The distrust towards any external analysis of creativity’s mystery, however, continued to be shared by all. It is important to emphasize that in elevating poetry (or literature) to a status equal to that of religion – the step with which the Transcendentalists departed from Unitarianism – they never for a 29

Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 58.

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moment envisioned separating the creative process from the finished work, neither the finished work from the effect it was meant to produce. For the Transcendentalists everything was a matter of inspiration, of aesthetic-religious ascent towards sublime Truth or Reality, of poetic-spiritual revelation. The Poet-Priest was an inspired contemporary who wrote new bibles, while the words of the biblical prophets were to be read for inspiration and not for their authoritative moral teaching. Inspiration was at the beginning and the end of a triad, in the middle of which stood the work both as a finished product and as a source of inspiration. The commensurablity of art and religion, of poetry and preaching made this Transcendentalist triad impossible to break apart; in the eyes of the Transcendentalists themselves it was not even a triad, but an absolute whole: hence the impossibility to take it apart, because the very thought of interfering with the sacred trinity was intolerable. Precisely here, in fact, lie the foundations of the personified cult of inspiration: to the degree that he himself is lit by divine fire to illuminate others, that he is inspired in order to inspire others, the Poet-Priest stands at the very center of the Transcendentalist aesthetic-religious worldview. If seen from this perspective, the central place of the traditional New England Puritan element in Transcendentalism coincides with the centrality of the finished literary work linking inspiration with inspiration in the triad. The Transcendentalist Poet is a Priest just as much as the poetic work is a new bible: the Poet cannot exist without being also a Priest, and neither can the work exist without integrating the biblical element. That is why Transcendentalist thought did not make a distinction between the two. Between inspiration as illumination and inspiration as affect there stood the Poet-Priest with his poetic-spiritual revelation (his Word). Apart from everything else, the personifier of inspiration also affirmed the inseparability of the Transcendentalist idea of creative process, finished literary work and its reception by the audience. Given the established equality between religious and aesthetic experience, the possible result was one only: to build the holy sanctuary of inspiration. There one treaded with exaltation, any attempt at analysis amounting to blasphemy. That was why the Transcendentalists relied on extremely generalized notions: just as the Poet-Priest presented an ideal, sought for in vain in the real world, Emerson could express dissatisfaction with the variety of

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existing literary works, exclaiming “Poems! – we have no Poem!”30 Through such notions and such language, the Puritan pastor substratum of their spiritual and, by implication, their aesthetic views, augmented the originally Romantic inclination of the New England Transcendentalists to deify intuition, inspiration and the imagination. Hence the focus on verbal mastery or on poetic techniques appeared intolerable; all elements were taken together to constitute a supreme unity, sublime truth, in short – grace. (These statements do not describe the literary practices of the most noted among the Transcendentalists.) The belief in such sacred aesthetic-spiritual wholeness makes the Transcendentalists’ derisively angry rejection of their contemporary Edgar Allan Poe entirely explicable. Poe’s tragic solitary presence in nineteenth-century American literature was to a great degree due to the already well-established Transcendentalist ideas about creativity, in view of which any avant-garde approach to art was an anathema. And Poe was accordingly stigmatized: “The jingle man” was Emerson’s fatally ironic definition of the poet,31 the same poet that a little later Charles Baudelaire would translate into French and proclaim to be the precursor of European Modernism. Edgar Allan Poe was so singularly different in his writing and criticism, so apart in lifestyle, that the very perception of his otherness – moreover an otherness profoundly incomprehensible – elicited only negative reactions in his already settled in reputation and influence contemporaries. While Walt Whitman was extolled by Emerson as the incarnation of his Poet-Priest, Poe was mercilessly repudiated. And although Poe, in his turn, did not spare his fellow writers from New England, in comparison with theirs, his voice was too feeble and isolated: Emerson died well advanced in age, rich and famous, whereas Poe passed away almost anonymously, in the throes of misery, despair and alcoholism, barely forty years of age. The difference is striking first and foremost because it juxtaposes two human fates. But it is no less striking in showing the different fates of two artists. Poe came to stand for the archetype of the Western European modernist poet, mainly as the precursor of the French symbolist poets, whereas the Transcendentalists remained strongly associated with the entirely Puritan, quite American figure of the Poet30 31

Emerson, The Complete Works, VIII, 74. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, I, 1357.

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Priest. In themselves, the dissimilarities do not present any grounds for evaluation: only the difference which led to mutual rejection, but in no way implies that the achievement of one or the other was greater. While the Transcendentalists considered unacceptable any external analysis of creativity’s holy mystery, Poe attempted precisely such analysis. In “The Poetic Principle”, and especially in “The Philosophy of Composition”, he traces – in a perfectly rational manner, moreover while underlining the logic of his analytical method – the path undertaken by the poet in the completion of his work. Since for Poe the impression a poem leaves on the reader, its poetical effect, is of utmost importance, he begins by the smallest, at least at first sight, details – the length of the text (calculated precisely – one hundred lines so that the poem is short enough “to be read at one sitting”), its euphony or sonorousness which aims at the greatest possible beauty of assonance, the function of the refrain as literal repetition of the prosodic phrase but with variation in meaning, and so on, until the single final metaphor of the poem “The Raven”, which retrospectively transforms the poetical effect of the whole text, providing its symbolic dimensions (“The Philosophy of Composition”). The creative process here is stripped of all mystery; it is not only broken into components and analyzed coolly from the outside, but also presented as authorial work which deliberately, almost in a pragmatic way, targets the maximum effect on the reader (Poe describes his own poetic approach). Evidently, there is no mention of any sacredness, any inspiration at all. It is equally evident that there is no question of desecration either: everything in the process is described in terms of simple, almost self-evident, identifiable facts – the facts of poetic craftsmanship. Poe creates the impression that he is merely stating what rational, measured steps he took in writing “The Raven”, so complete is his attention to the ins and outs of writing, or more precisely, of the craft of writing. Composition seems to consist here of technique only and little else. Such an approach is obviously entirely foreign to the Transcendentalists – in theory. And Poe proceeds with it precisely in theory. For “The Raven” was already finished and the analytical description post factum posed no danger to the process of writing. Only in the end does “The Philosophy of Composition” point to that “under-current” which, in fact, traverses the whole poem but emerges

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visibly only in the one retrospectively transformative final metaphor: the raven becomes a symbol, the conversation with the bird acquires symbolical dimensions, the refrain “Nevermore” resounds with the sinister, uncontrollable surge of irrational emotion, while the overall oppressive atmosphere takes on the symbolism of dark and overwhelming despair. (The fascination Poe held for the French symbolist poets is perfectly comprehensible.) The mood is only suggested, but that, Poe believes, makes its melancholy influence much stronger than if it was stated directly and incessantly. And here, while discussing in a rational manner the irrational, the unspeakable, which can only be present as a suggestive “under-current of meaning”, Poe feels compelled to mention “the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists” (and indeed versification was the Transcendentalists’ greatest weakness). The irony is more than unambiguous, but it obviously comes from no “jingle man”: to Poe’s mind, which is purely poetic, absolutely detached from any religious traditions, the Transcendentalists do not have the skills necessary to create suggestiveness, but obsessed with the idea of pouring revelations directly into words, which, in their turn, could directly affect the reader, they render what should be suggested meaning “the upper- instead of the under-current of the theme”, with the result of seriously undermining the aesthetic quality of their work.32 Poe rejects the priestly moralizing tone of the Transcendentalists, while they, inversely, refuse to accept his rational fixation on poetic technique bringing with it his complete indifference to poetry as inspiration. (The differences outlined above were, in fact, the only basis for comparison perceptible to both Poe and the Transcendentalists.) A great public dispute on aesthetic matters never took place between them; yet, it was beyond doubt that their respective positions on the secrets of poetic composition were mutually exclusive – what the Transcendentalists believed essential was superficial for Poe and vice versa. Therefore, sparking a possible discussion on the subject probably seemed useless to all concerned: Emerson’s characterization of Poe and Poe’s brief mention in “The Philosophy of Composition” constitute perhaps the only record of the otherwise evident opposition in the beliefs of the two authors. Bringing this opposition to the foreground, however, is important because it highlights the emergence 32

Edgar Allan Poe, Prose and Poetry, Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1983, 322.

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of a new – avant-garde – trend in American literature and literary thought in the first half of the nineteenth century. The incompatibility between Emerson’s and Poe’s views was furthermore the projection of another, more fundamental contradiction – that between poetic theory and poetic practice. Most of the Transcendentalists – with all their inspired theories about the inviolable sanctity of creative inspiration overflowing, as if by itself, into inspired speech – treated with great seriousness and sobriety, as mentioned earlier, the necessity to edit texts into fine finished works. They never addressed such matters in writing, however, as that would have contradicted their theoretical views. Yet editing remained a permanent part of the Transcendentalists’ creative practice. By contrast, Poe built his theory of poetic composition on the basis of pure technique, even though he related the latter to symbolic planes of reference; in practice, however, he habitually wrote in a state of alcohol- or drug-induced delirium (which precisely made his persona so attractive for the European Decadents). Yet, he never discussed the subject in writing: Poe too had a domain of experience which was not accessible to theorizing. Both in Poe and in the Transcendentalists, there was a gap between the theory of creativity and the actual practice of writing, and practice was something one did not discuss. True, and painful, irrationality was nevertheless to be found in Poe. The Transcendentalists experienced irrationality mostly as productive exaltation, and only the lack of a corresponding creative state of mind was felt to be painful. Therefore, they could eulogize inspiration unto eternity, but could not imagine desecrating it with any analysis of poetic technique; whereas for Poe only technique appeared incorruptible. The contrast between the Transcendentalists and Poe, made on the basis of the concepts of inspiration vs. craftsmanship, and aesthetic theory vs. creative practice, leads to another very important question: that of the true nature of Transcendentalist inspiration. In his perfect devotion to literature, determining also his complete neutrality towards religion and religious experience, Poe tossed between states of delirium and the black marasmus which followed them taking over his tormented soul, furrowed by deathly despair. The raven had pierced this soul with its beak forevermore and out of the pain, was born the fine poetry of melancholy and profound, unconscious, irrational darkness. No such states could be observed in New England’s Puritan-minded Transcendentalists. Inspiration for them, as

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their contemporary and fellow thinker Frederic Henry Hedge noted, was “no turbulent emotion, no fever of the blood – no unnatural heat. It [had] nothing of the whirlwind or the tempest, but that repose which belongs alike to nature and to mind in their most healthy moods – the calmness of the sunshine – the tranquility of intense contemplation.”33 In his critical study on Henry David Thoreau, written exactly a century later, Sherman Paul also singles out the Transcendentalist tendency to see in creative inspiration the sign of good spiritual health.34 So, unlike Poe, the Transcendentalists were not given to painful torment: it was the lively Puritan faith and creativeness, the New England first settlers’ clarity of purpose and vigor which shaped them as Artists, Creators, Poets, Priests. The capitalization of their terms did not simply emphasize their positive, purposeful, healthy creative energy, but directly declared it. Creativity for the Transcendentalists was not a release from pain, an escape, a sought for relief, but the sublime flight of poetic-religious revelation: true to their Puritan – and typically New England – temperament, their creative state was one of full and wholesome trust in faith, itself once more, firmly and in a unique way, re-established in poetry. Such state of faith allowed no room for tormented suffering, for ascents and plummeting declines; the equal ranks religion and art held in Transcendentalist aesthetics guaranteed a balanced conception of creative inspiration, entirely positive in its goals. This does not imply that the Transcendentalists were not familiar with the anguish of uninspired moments – they knew it well, but they never sank into the despair and oblivion of a creative collapse. Precisely in such periods Emerson wrote his most exalted eulogies of inspiration and Thoreau suffused his Journal with the quiet nostalgia over past illuminations, never, though, giving in to the sense of hopelessness. Spirituality itself, so highly esteemed and everywhere present in the writings of the Transcendentalists, charged them with constant positiveness – as artists, as thinkers and as men: high moralists are never pessimists. The Poet in them uplifted the Priest, while the Priest grounded and balanced the Poet. The formula indeed suggests “most healthy moods”.

33

Quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 64-65. Sherman Paul, The Shores of America, Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1958, 106-108. 34

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Therefore it becomes clear why the Transcendentalists posited the spiritual self-fulfillment attained in the aesthetic-religious revelation of inspiration within the framework of man’s natural perfection, and not that of a supernatural, trance-like experience. “Which is greater & more affecting”, Emerson asks, “to see some wonderful bird descending out of the sky, or, to see the rays of a heavenly majesty of the mind & heart emitted from the countenance & port of a man?”.35 The answer is implied in the question – spiritual experience depends on one’s inner preparedness to receive messages from beyond (it is a matter of “self-reliance”, Emerson would say elsewhere), more than it is an illumination from above. The point is that the Transcendentalists in fact did not glorify – and did not live through – mystical experiences; mysticism was foreign to them both as an aestheticspiritual practice and as theory. “’Tis remarkable that our faith in ecstasy consists with total inexperience of it”,36 Emerson admits. Very few other Transcendentalists left any testimony of having had mystical visions: Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott and Orestes Brownson mention isolated cases from their own experience;37 as for Thoreau, who, advanced in years, lamented his loss of spontaneous perception, it is perhaps the most accurate to say that he was “a youthful mystic” who later “lost the ability to enter the ecstatic state”.38 In reality, almost everything Thoreau wrote – regardless of his claim that he was “a mystic, a transcendentalist”39 – had nothing to do with mysticism. So even while elevating inspiration into a cult, the Transcendentalists did not embrace the ecstatic visions and the states of religious trance known in the history of Christianity: they all came from the Unitarian milieu, which did not fail to leave its impact on them. The very fact that they personified their absolute center, the notion of inspiration, into the figure of the Poet-Priest already accentuated the Poet’s God-like stature while creating, not his position of subservience in a state of ecstasy. The rationalist trends of the time and their Puritan pragmatism had their say: moralist preaching was 35

Emerson, The Journals, VI, 236. Emerson, The Complete Works, VI, 213. 37 Quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 59-60. 38 Ethel Seybold, Thoreau: The Quest and the Classics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951, 73. 39 Thoreau, The Journal, V, 4-5. 36

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elevated into high spirituality, which – in its very essence different from religious ecstasy – poured forth into poetry. To raise aesthetic experience to the level of to oneness with religious experience changed the nature of what was lived as revelation – the personal, active, artistic element came to the foreground, enriched, at the same time, with the idea of mission – poetic as well as moral. The inspiration was to create works which were meant to inspire one’s neighbors: this formulation, which included both creativity and utility, both the sense of personal vocation to make art and the imperative to lead “the congregation”, is decidedly not mystical. It contains no element of the supernatural even in theory, despite the inspired encomiums of creative inspiration’s irrational essence. Since it was perceived as irrational, but not supernatural, Emerson calls the imagination “a natural element in the divine organism of the human mind”.40 Clearly, an extreme, religious, trance-like state is lacking in the Transcendentalist notion of inspiration: inspiration was experienced and understood as natural, although often extolled in radical, even at times euphoric, terms. What is more, according to Emerson, the Poet’s peculiar sight “reads Nature to the end of delight and of moral use”:41 the “Priest” component in the figure of the PoetPriest is always present in its decidedly utilitarian function, ensuring that the Poet’s consciousness keeps in view the final purpose of his inspired moments put into words. Therefore, in the felicitous phrase of one scholar, for the Transcendentalists “religion was an experience above, not beneath, the rational faculty”.42 So, the poet’s “divine frenzy” remains mostly a subject of theoretical panegyrics. As highly intellectual and refined individuals, who were moreover extremely well educated, not just by comparison with the rest of America at the time but in general, the Transcendentalists could not refrain from intellectualizing their poetic talent – in theory, but also and most of all in their practice as writers. Good health became for them a dimension of artistic ability: hence the strong emphasis on the natural (and not the supernatural), the interest in Nature and everything in it as a source of inspiration and consequently, of poeticspiritual self-fulfillment. The Unitarian common sense, which was 40

Emerson, The Complete Works, III, 26. Ibid., VIII, 22. 42 Howard Mumford Jones, Belief and Disbelief in American Literature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, 54. 41

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instrumental in their education, in its turn, oriented them towards utility, towards clarity of moral purpose. Thus the Transcendentalist notion of inspiration represented not only a unique blending of religious and aesthetic experience, but also of artistic temperament and a Puritan sense of mission, which brought with it the need for applicability. Precisely this natural, earthly, rational-utilitarian element in the otherwise sublime aesthetic-religious nature ascribed to inspiration determined the unique influence the idea would have on the personal fate of the Transcendentalists: they saw in creative inspiration a poetic-religious vocation, as well as their life’s calling. Creativity and behavior, art and life were fused together: the PoetPriest is unimaginable without his mission, and that mission is comprehended not only as poetic-religious, but also as the individual’s self-fulfillment in life.

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CHAPTER FIVE TRANSCENDENTALISM: POETIC-RELIGIOUS PRACTICE AND WAY OF LIFE Doubt not, O poet, but persist.1 The best you can write will be the best you are.2

Directly related to their New England roots, the devoted Puritan faith of the Transcendentalists was shaped so elaborately and artistically, lived through in such a creative way that art became its supreme form of expression – this is why, for the Transcendentalists, the greatness of art was commensurate to its spiritual and moral truth. Although fully aware that a work of art may be composed of paint strokes, musical notes, or words, the Transcendentalists did not look for proofs of craftsmanship or artistic mastery in a work, but solely for the aesthetic-religious revelation it could provide. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the stronger artistic temperaments among them inevitably faced a dilemma: how to be artists, or even art critics, if their views on art were entirely moral-oriented? Even those Transcendentalists who came closest to being professional writers experienced this dilemma, and found the notion of literature based exclusively on criteria of craftsmanship unacceptable (which has already been discussed in a different connection). “Nothing goes by luck in composition”, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “It allows of no tricks …. The author’s character is read from title-page to end.” 3 Thoreau here is obviously referring to self-discipline, and at least at first sight it may appear that he is speaking about verbal technique, about the meticulous elaboration of the text. But a closer look at this Journal entry would reveal that he is in fact referring to moral 1

Emerson, “The Poet”, Selected Essays, 223. Thoreau, The Journal, 225. 3 Ibid., 226. 2

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responsibility and sincerity. Even a master of poetic style like Thoreau, who, in his actual writing, paid extraordinary attention to giving the perfect shape to a text, placed spiritual truthfulness, the sublime moral message of the work of art, above everything else. And if this is true for Thoreau, it is all the more valid for the other Transcendentalists, especially those who were less artistic or less devoted to writing. Their unwavering creed is contained in Emerson’s words: “The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body.”4 Clearly, the Transcendentalists measured the value of the creative process, as well as that of the finished work, according to moral categories (most often Christian virtues). What is more, this was done with reference to the personality of the creator – the moral qualities of the creator were seen as a necessary premise for creativity. Thus, while stressing the aesthetic dimensions of spiritual experience and its expression, the Transcendentalists posited spirituality in full dependence on character. The creator’s personal morals, which inevitably predetermine a work’s sublimely moral message, became the measure for value, including aesthetic value, because personal morals were seen as the expression of that absolute, clear, simple and perfect truthful authenticity, which represents for the Transcendentalists the beginning of all beginnings. Although it may appear otherwise, there is no contradiction here with the Transcendentalist idea of inspiration: on the contrary, the requirement of high morality serves to emphasize, once more, that inspiration was a fundamental aesthetic-religious category for the New England Transcendentalists. For they were aesthetes and men of spirit, wanderers among the vague shapes of beauty and of faith which spiritual revelation blended into one and between which they barely distinguished, as both remained relative to the much more clearly defined Puritan (and common Christian) notion of morality. While the Poet-Priest personifies the idea of inspiration, his figure embodies also the Transcendentalist (Puritan) notion of morality – the former is predetermined by the latter; the explicit presence of the “Priest” in Emerson’s formulation underlines its moralist purpose. This moralist purpose, moreover, encompasses not only the public, not only those who listen to the Poet-Priest’s poetic “sermon”; its scope for the Transcendentalists extends inward as well to include the character of 4

Emerson, Selected Essays, 217.

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the creator. As a result, it is not preaching itself which carries the charge of morality, but its counterpart – poetry: the poet takes upon himself the morality of the preacher. As far as the Transcendentalist inseparability of religious and aesthetic experience is concerned, everything here is a matter of nuance. The equal sign between religion and poetry – valid both in terms of the creative process and the work of art’s power of affect, itself measured within the parameters of creative inspiration – implies another, derivative, equality: if high morality and beauty are one, then the value of the finished work coincides with an author’s personal morals. Therefore, given that the Transcendentalists elevated poetry to the status of religion by continuing to define its value in religious categories, it seems perfectly natural that, in their view, the best an author (a creator) could write corresponded to the best in his character. This constituted another motive, along with the belief in the irrational nature of poetic inspiration, for the Transcendentalists’ definitive refusal to discuss poetic works in terms of verbal technique or composition. The Poet-Priest’s personal morals, his purity of soul and spirit became the guarantee of truthfulness, and by implication, of the value of the creative process and the finished work. In their convictions as poet-pastors, the Transcendentalists did not merely claim that every great artist had to be by definition a good man, but went even further, stating the reverse to be true: namely, that a good man made a great artist. Emerson’s “sublime vision”, which came to “the pure and simple soul”, expresses precisely such an idea. From the deep Puritan roots in the soil of their native Massachusetts, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, new shoots were emerging into life. The idea that art is the expression of personal character is not the invention of the New England Transcendentalists – it is a typically Romantic conception of art, whose beginnings stretch as far back as classical antiquity and old Christianity. However, as Lawrence Buell convincingly argues: What is provocatively unique about the Transcendentalists, is the seriousness with which they took it. It was no mere cultural shibboleth with them. Here, as at several other points, what differentiates them from the great English romantics as well as such compatriots as Hawthorne and Poe is not so much their critical principles as the

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What remains is to explore the underlying reasons for this seriousness and strictness (a question which Buell does not address). The Transcendentalists had only a very brief and fragile cultural tradition, but they could rely instead on the very powerful, solidly historically bound, and, moreover, entirely self-formation oriented religious tradition of their native New England. (The intention here is not to oppose cultural and religious traditions, but, once again, to foreground their pronounced, peculiarly New England, Puritan commensurability, which precisely gave rise to the idea of the PoetPriest.) Although the European Romantics revered the poet, with capital “P”, as well as the poet’s moral nature which overflowed into his songs, the double capital “P” of the American Transcendentalists was foreign to their thinking: the poet was only a poet, even if his moral stature was of great importance; the figure of the priest, whose morality was closely tied to religion and who could stand shoulder to shoulder with the poet, was absent. Therefore, the functional, practical and life-oriented moral teaching, which the New England Transcendentalists owed to the more or less visible but always present influence of the pulpit in their writings, was also lacking in European Romantics, and so was the recent past, not to mention the immediate present, of the New England Puritan pastor – this absolute spiritual leader whose calling was to guide tirelessly his fellow men. In contrast, it was impossible to imagine the Transcendentalist poet without the priest, without the Puritan pastor need to exert direct influence over life – not only because most Transcendentalists were acting clergymen, but because, even when not in service, deep down they identified with the image of the pastor. It was obviously impossible (and undesirable) to proclaim the great Transcendentalist synthesis of religious and aesthetic experience, of literary value and spiritual truthfulness, of poetry and preaching, without also projecting this synthesis onto the mirroring correspondence between creative (poetic) significance and the author’s (personal) morality: the figure of the Prophet, the Messiah, the Creator, the Poet-Priest emerged out of this double projection naturally and almost inevitably. Hence the 5

Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 67.

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seriousness of the New England Transcendentalists – they took upon themselves the responsibility of spiritual leaders, enriching it and elevating it into a form of art. There were no shibboleths and romantic posturing with them: the pulpit from which they sang their aestheticreligious revelations was raised too high, the mission of achieving (and leading others to achieve) transcendence towards the supreme truth of spirituality and poetry’s oneness was existentially too significant to allow for any posturing. The Transcendentalists could, therefore, accept the messianic character of the Poet-Priest with nothing less than seriousness. Besides, and even more importantly, they could accept it as nothing less than personal destiny. The Transcendentalists maintained that there was no distinction between aesthetic-religious work and private behavior, between creativity and life: such was at least their conviction and they aspired to apply it to real life as much as was within their power. This pertained both to their view of creativity as supreme self-fulfillment and their inclination as Puritan pastors towards shaping and perfecting the moral dimensions of actual life. If creativity, understood as that which makes men equal to God, corresponds to the author’s moral stature, then the poet’s mission in life has to meet extremely high expectations. But the messianic calling to lead others into the attainment of sublime spiritual truth binds the poet’s fate to that of his fellow men. So the New England Transcendentalists had a double reason to search for the perfect correspondence of convictions and reality, which indeed they did – the Poet-Priest became the image of a desired mode of life. “Life is the Poem; Man is the Poet”, they tirelessly affirmed in an effort to convince themselves that they had discovered their true vocation in life, whose poetic essence they could see better than anyone else, endowed as they were with the supreme gaze which, in its own turn, made it their duty to express what they saw in the inspired words of missionary men. Gazing steadily into the ideal, they began to see their own lives within the same absolute aesthetic-religious dimensions (to such an extent that they felt at times disappointed with art, because even the greatest work of art could not adequately express the fulfilling experience of inspiration). As Margaret Fuller observed in The Dial: A man who has within his mind some spark of genius or a capacity for the exercises of talent should consider himself as endowed with a

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Emerson’s Poet-Priest became a model defining not simply the role of the poet in the reality of others, in the Christian manner referred to as fellow men or neighbors, but also a model for how one was to perceive one’s own individual reality. With their characteristic seriousness and strictness, the Transcendentalists saw in the PoetPriest an ideal, and, also, a figure they could identify with in reality: the idea of the Poet-Priest not only personified the absolute center of their aesthetics – inspiration, but this idea was itself personified, embodied, by means of their own lives. To what degree depended on the temperament of each; the more artistic natures among the Transcendentalists understandably devoted themselves to the ideal with greater conviction than did the acting ministers, who, nevertheless, invariably filled their sermons with the Poet-Priest’s fiery inspiration. Thus, to differing degrees, for better or for worse, the New England Transcendentalists shaped their own lives according to the precepts of an idea: their ambition was too clear and powerful to be taken lightly – all the more so, given the substantial consequences of such deliberate molding of fate. The seriousness and dedication of the Transcendentalists did not merely manifest a religiously Romantic inclination towards messianism, towards a prophetic mission. Such an explanation is too facile to be entirely correct. If that were the case, the whole idea would have remained in the domain of abstraction or would have fallen into posturing, into inauthentic role-playing. But nothing of the kind happened with the Transcendentalists. On the contrary, the act of making a personal choice was so strongly pronounced that it is often difficult to differentiate to what extent, in their ambition to embody their model figure, they followed given principles or, alternatively, pursued their own initiative. The image of the Poet-Priest, apart from all else, was the fruit of the Transcendentalists’ intellectual sophistication, of their extraordinary for its time erudition and breadth of mind, as well as of the remarkable artistic talent of the leading representatives among them, so the image could not but impress all (or at least most) of the Transcendentalists, and no doubt exercised its 6 Margaret Fuller, Life Without and Life Within, ed. Arthur B. Fuller, Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860, 192.

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fascination as something far greater than a simple ideal construct. “The provocation is not that the Law is there, but the means are alluring”, 7 Emerson was convinced. And the group of co-thinkers around him consisted precisely of people with such a mindset: it was no accident that the group never formed a school of thought but remained in the vaguely defined outlines of an intellectual and artistic movement. It was the Transcendentalists’ artistic and intellectual refinement which led them indeed to devote their attention to creativity, to literature, Poetry. And again, it was their artistic and spiritual refinement which transformed their dedication to literature into a life-determining choice – the Poet-Priest was not simply a role to play, but, more than anything, the naming for the inner make-up of a character. With the best known among the New England Transcendentalists, the desire to create a real correspondence between actual life and poetic-religious ideal was therefore extremely pronounced: just as the ideal was the fruit of thought and creativity, it had to be pursued with conviction and inspiration. Along with their responsibility as spiritual leaders and their Puritan commitment to influencing actual life, this desire for correspondence was another important, although less evident, reason for the seriousness and strictness with which not a few among the Transcendentalists veered their personal fate towards the ideal standing before them in such attractive clarity. The consequences were no less serious and quite indicative, because, not merely established in theory, but accepted as existentially determinative, the Transcendentalist self-identification inevitably required a real life career. However, finding such a career proved difficult. Transcendentalism was born in Massachusetts, and it drew abundantly on the history and the spirituality of the region, renewing and enriching it with its intellectual vigor, sophistication, beauty and culture. But Massachusetts had more to offer from its past than in its present. In its present, New England represented for the Transcendentalists mostly the object of various negations: the Transcendentalists rejected a number of already limiting Unitarian views and still many of them had to face the inadequacy of actual career choices which New England was offering. Because to that poetic, and also inherently New 7

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, 10 vols, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 19091914, VI, 144.

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England, devotion to one’s true vocation, Massachusetts in the first half of the nineteenth century provided no real conditions for professional fulfillment. So – while equating art and life not only in theory, but, most of all, in their positive desire to identify themselves fully with the ideal – the Transcendentalists had to confront the lack of any institutional opportunities for realizing their ambitions. If they had chosen to be artists only, even though the professional writer was still an unknown entity in New England, their path would probably have been easier, or at least somewhat clearer. The Transcendentalists, however, chose to be aesthetes-clergymen, religious artists, PoetPriests. The pulpit was their natural element, even if they often perceived it metaphorically: only from the pulpit were they able the extend their prophetic and messianic gaze, lit by the consciousness of divine calling, and “transcend” or carry the visibilities of ordinary life beyond the visible. But the pulpit, literally the church pulpit, was no longer sufficient. Even those Transcendentalists who were active clergymen felt the need for other forms of self-expression, and like William Ellery Channing, began to write literary criticism, essays and poetry, or, like Theodore Parker, consoled themselves with the thought that they were different from conventional pastors.8 Therefore it comes as no surprise that Emerson’s public resignation from serving the church acquired symbolic significance for the entire Transcendentalist movement: many of the younger Transcendentalists never took the holy orders (which did not mean that the priest in them was deprived of his rights). Judging by the paths chosen by the New England Transcendentalists, especially when comparing the vocational choices of members of different ages within the group, it may be inferred that the institution of the church quickly lost its attraction as a possible career.9 Yet until that time, the church had been the only institutional option for educated young men with intellectual and artistic capacities. Profoundly Puritan New England had nothing else to offer – and no other options had yet come into being. Notwithstanding, in most cases the Transcendentalists rejected that only available vocational choice, so firmly established in their native Massachusetts – it proved to be too constricting, too narrow for the Poet with capital “P”. It remains to see what precisely motivated this choice and what consequences it entailed. 8

9

See Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 24-35. See Hudson, Religion in America, 127-29.

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The contemporary Unitarian clergy accused the Transcendentalists of discrediting organized religion and of undermining the activity of the church.10 But, as has already been mentioned, Transcendentalism was more a consequence than an initial cause. Having emerged from its very midst, Transcendentalism decisively outgrew Unitarianism in spiritual and intellectual stature; it overcame its limited rationalism, leading the way to a new epoch and towards different spiritual horizons. Anchored in its distrust of emotion, and continuing to argue that divine truth was attainable through rational effort, Unitarianism was already an isolated phenomenon by the 1830s, which was the time of an unprecedented revival of Protestant sects in America. Captive to its long obsolete deism, Unitarianism gradually became confined to Massachusetts, where it remained foreign to the overall anti-rationalist upsurge of religious fervor, known in American history as “the Second Great Awakening”.11 In fact, New England Transcendentalism “transcended” Unitarianism itself: it embraced aesthetic and spiritual breadth, setting its aim not on pure religion, but on creating an elevated cultural horizon. If Massachusetts experienced “a second awakening”, that awakening was unquestionably Transcendentalism itself. It was therefore only natural that the Unitarian church pulpit was no longer sufficient for the Transcendentalists. Transcendentalism, in reality, emerged at the time of a crisis in the Unitarian Church of New England, which it deepened but did not in itself cause. Although Unitarianism, in the beginning of the century, enjoyed an extraordinary flourishing, attracting numberless parishioners and practically all men of prominence, by the third decade of the century it was becoming clear that Unitarianism was not going to lead the religious reformation in America, but that it amounted to no more than a small ripple against the powerful wave of religious passion sweeping its way across the whole country. The Unitarian Church, confined now within the state of Massachusetts, was beginning to lose, even there, its previous influence. If until recently it had provided the only option for spiritual self-fulfillment, it was no longer capable of giving the same satisfaction in clerical life. The reverence towards the pastor, perceived before as a patriarch, a shepherd of his flock, which had offered compensation for the frugal, 10 See Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Abingdon, 1957. 11 Ibid., 14.

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often miserable life of a clergyman, was gradually disappearing. The relationship between pastor and congregation was becoming weaker.12 The advances in the educational system (especially with Harvard University situated just outside Boston) and the rise of the popular press quickly undermined the status of the priest as the most knowledgeable person in the parish; the constant need to counter the influence of newly emerging worldly organizations, such as reform societies, the anti-slavery movement and numerous new lyceums, also weakened the unique position traditionally held by the pastor. As a result, by 1835, withdrawing from the ministry had become quite common. 13 Thus, while the powerful religious revival spreading quickly over America made Unitarianism lose its leading role and appear as a minor regional movement, the increasing opportunities in secular life (in social, economic and especially cultural life) gradually overtook much of Unitarianism’s previously unrivaled authority. These changes, however, did not weaken the Puritan religious tradition itself – its roots were planted too deeply, its influence was too inextricably bound with New England’s history. It was the institutional form of Puritanism which lost its former leading position. Emerson’s public resignation from service was in the eyes of many Harvard graduates of extraordinary significance precisely because Emerson did not repudiate the role of the pastor, but, on the contrary, with the ardent faith of his New England forefathers, he elevated the pastor’s status even higher, freeing him from the church pulpit and endowing him with the pulpit of poetry – with the artistic and intellectual temperament of his contemporary cultural milieu. Transcendentalism, then, came to fill the vacuum left by Unitarianism’s decline in the spiritual relationship between pastor and congregation, taking this relationship outside of its institutional framework. Outside the institution, but where and in what form did the Transcendentalists propose to create new modes of communication between pastor and audience? “A man enters the D. [Divinity] School but knows not what shall befall him there, or where he shall come out of its tortuous track”, Emerson wrote in 1841: “Some reappear in trade, some in the navy, 12

See Hudson, Religion in America, 129. See Daniel Calhoun, Professional Lives in America: Structure and Aspiration, 1750-1850, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965, 88-107.

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some in Swedenborg chapels, some in landscape painting.” 14 Evidently, the confusion of new graduates was great. The sole vocational option had lost its attraction, and the highly educated, spiritually refined young men, often with profoundly artistic temperaments, had no other choices. The facts speak for themselves: if at the end of the seventeenth century half of all Harvard graduates became clergymen, between 1800 and 1830 the numbers fell to fifteen percent, between 1830 and 1850 to ten percent, while the graduating class of 1855 contained no future ministers at all.15 As far as the career opportunities offered by the Unitarian church were concerned, antiinstitutional attitudes had won the day. Transcendentalism, for its part, had transformed the perception of anti-institutionalism, relating it to the sense of a high calling, of an aesthetic-religious mission. But things went no further. So what could become of all those who embraced the ideal of the Transcendentalist vocation? The problem was precisely in the absolute nature of that ideal, because, as mentioned earlier, the Transcendentalists aspired to the ideal of the Poet-Priest with utmost seriousness. In fact, the lack of vocational options for Harvard graduates, then constituting the intellectual elite of New England, was an issue which did not affect only those in the Transcendentalist circle – Emerson’s words quoted above confirm the larger scope of the problem. Yet for the Transcendentalists, exceptionally self-demanding in their desire to blur all boundaries between spiritual life and actual career path, the issue was of extreme importance. When it came down to choosing one’s fate, a choice moreover which had to express one’s innermost nature, the antiinstitutional Transcendentalists began to search for, and invent, new institutions. The New England lyceum rapidly became a possible outlet, especially as it involved speaking in front of a public in a manner very close to that of preaching – something the Transcendentalists deeply appreciated. Giving public lectures required all the usual rhetorical skill and was of particular attraction because the speaker had unprecedented freedom. “You may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius”, Emerson wrote in a letter to Carlyle.16 Most Transcendentalists were familiar with public speaking, 14

Emerson, The Journals, VIII, 119. Quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 49. 16 The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater, New York: 15

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and many knew the satisfactions of successful lecturing. The lyceum provided them with a pulpit (or, more precisely, with a lectern) outside of the church; what is more, they had a public whose expectations surpassed those of regular service-attending parishioners. That was why Transcendentalist writing in so many cases originated in lecture notes and passed through the stage of the finished lecture, the essay, etc., before becoming a book. Lecturing seemed to prove the ideal alternative vocational path for the Poet-Priest. The lyceum – particularly the one in Concord – in no time became a fitting outlet for the spirit of Transcendentalism, while making of its proponents something of a public success. But that was the most Massachusetts could offer at the time – and, quite predictably, very soon that was not enough either. Being a new form of public life, still in the process of establishing itself, the lyceum provided only an unregulated opportunity for the public dissemination of ideas, a venue for different aspirations, talents and oratorical skills. But the lyceum could not become an institutional vocational option for the anti-institutionally minded Transcendentalists – that would have contradicted the very reasons for its existence. The lyceum did not have the status of such an institution and by definition could not acquire it. The facts are revealing: except for Emerson and Theodore Parker, no other Transcendentalist achieved particular success in the lyceum; also, the payments for lecturing were extremely irregular and small. At the same time, although people came with expectations different from those they brought to the church, the audience in the lyceum often disappointed the Transcendentalists – Thoreau’s dream to join the society of Plato and Aristotle expressed precisely such disappointment.17 The lyceum then was an attractive option in theory, but much less so in reality. Lecturing was a close enough alternative to Unitarian preaching, though professionally, it provided neither gratification nor sufficient compensation. It represented public service, but did not amount to a socially acceptable career option. As a result, the Transcendentalists came in contact with real life, with life’s material and financial needs, only in so far as they managed to push aside temporarily the ideal of the Poet-Priest and accepted more or less institutionally regulated roles – such as that of a priest (Channing, Columbia University Press, 1964, 171. 17 Thoreau, The Journal, V, 4-5.

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Parker), a person of independent means (Emerson), a teacher (Thoreau, Alcott), a journalist (Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody), a land-surveyor, a pencil producer (Thoreau), etc. All of these were accidental roles which received positive social sanction but had nothing to do with the Transcendentalists’ poetic-religious calling. There is only one way to explain this phenomenon: it reflected confusion in choosing possible career paths, which was brought about by the force of circumstances. Such was the case particularly of the younger followers of Emerson who left the ministry or, worse, were never ordained priests. No doubt the consequences of such confusion affected many individually. As Sherman Paul observed: All Emerson's young men had trouble in choosing careers. Indeed, in looking back over that generation one finds in the wake of Transcendentalism a series of personal failures.18

It is no less important, however, to understand the nature of that force of circumstance responsible for so many failures. It cannot be explained merely by the lack of institutional opportunities for professional development. Thoreau, for instance, says that he experienced: “a fullness of life, which does not find any channels to flow into. I feel myself uncommonly prepared for some literary work, but I can select no work.” 19 His words vividly and unambiguously summarize the inner tumult felt by almost all Transcendentalists, particularly those with strong literary impulses. “They were going through the most severe crisis of identity (‘vocation’ was their word for it) that New England had seen; they were the first really modern American generation in that respect, as in several others”, Lawrence Buell rightly observes.20 There was no socially sanctioned solution to the problem, as a consequence of which New England’s Transcendentalists searched continuously for new metaphors, at times falling into pomposity, in their attempts to define what they called their “vocation”. “I would fain be a fisherman, hunter, farmer, preacher, etc., but fish, hunt, farm, preach other things than usual”, eloquently but with a certain vagueness Thoreau remarks in his 18

Paul, The Shores of America, 16. Thoreau, The Journal, II, 467. 20 Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 53. 19

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Journal,21 adding elsewhere: “My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in Nature.”22 The metaphor became the Transcendentalists’ preferred figure of speech and one of the reasons for this preference was also the lack of feasible professional frameworks in the actual world. When the pastor John Sullivan Dwight lost his job, Elizabeth Peabody tried to console him with the suggestion: “the ravens shall feed thee.” She then encouraged him to “minister in a truly transcendental way to a true church of friends ... without money & without price – celebrating the communion of the Lord”.23 The metaphorical expressions were clear symptoms of the tumultuous inner state shared by almost everyone with artistic impulses in Emerson’s circle. This state can rightly be called “a crisis of identity”: each one of Emerson’s Transcendentalists identified with the image of the Poet-Priest in perfect seriousness, but that led to nothing concrete or satisfying in reality. Therefore, partly in self-preservation, the Transcendentalists projected the sense of gratification they could find in poetic and intellectual work beyond the reality of everyday life; they made it “transcendent”, locating it in a domain absolutely detached from the everyday – in the high realms of the spirit, of poetic-religious revelation and creative inspiration. In order to raise ordinary professional activities, which offered moreover no actual vocational options, to the heights of that otherworldly domain, the Transcendentalists transformed them into metaphors – one of the “professions” Thoreau undertakes in Walden, for example, is “self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms”, a variation of the newly invented Transcendentalist profession of “finding God in Nature”. “I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet”, Thoreau writes in Walden, only to add with melancholy self-irony: I went on thus for a long time, I may say it without boasting, faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance.24 21

Thoreau, The Journal, VI, 45. Ibid., VI, 472. 23 Quoted in Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 51. 24 Thoreau, Walden, 12. 22

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These were the consequences of adopting Emerson’s “sublime vision” – its elevated point of view made the New England Transcendentalists into men with a calling but without real careers. “A little integrity is better than any career”, Emerson firmly admonished,25thus endorsing an impractical attitude and affirming it as the distinguishing feature of the creator or poet devoted to his mission. And although he tirelessly encouraged Alcott, Channing, Very, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller in their literary work, his influence in fact kept them away from literary success – at least the literary success the world at large acknowledged. “The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind”, Thoreau was convinced: “Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?” 26 The fact is that what the Transcendentalists considered unquestionable literary achievement in general failed to meet the approval of their contemporary public (which in their Romantic eyes constituted another of a work’s merits). Thus, when his first published book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, failed to sell and Thoreau was forced to buy back all of the remaining copies from his publisher, he noted in his Journal with humorous bitterness: “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”27 In Walden, however, the distant echo of that first failure resounds differently: I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.28

Thoreau’s solution was to choose the independent “profession of the woods” – his Walden enterprise. The disparity between personal and public perception of the literary work, which was evident with most Transcendentalists, had much to do with Emerson’s authoritative advocacy of uncompromising spirituality, of the need to fix one’s gaze firmly on the absolute, as well as his ambiguous and somewhat extravagant 25

Emerson, The Complete Works, VI, 189. Thoreau, Walden, 13. 27 Thoreau, The Journal, V, 459. 28 Thoreau, Walden, 13. 26

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views on the nature of the poet’s calling. Emerson considered himself a poet “in the sense of a perceiver and dear lover of the harmonies that are in the soul and in matter, and specially of the correspondences between these and those”.29 This is an eloquent summary of the idea of a synthesis between religious and aesthetic experience but it does not translate into anything practically achievable in real life. Emerson often posited the role of the Poet-Priest, both through the influence of his writing and through the powerful authority of his own personality, which attracted in its vicinity all of the Transcendentalists, in the sublime but somewhat constrained atmosphere of unconditional devotion. And the Poet-Priest’s style of life was embraced by the Transcendentalists voluntarily and even with exaltation. Emerson was revealing before the thirsty eyes of Harvard graduates sublime poeticreligious visions, offering those young men to climb to the pulpit of poetry, but, at the same time, he required their uncompromising devotion to that metaphorical absolute. Indeed, “Emerson’s blindness”, in Lawrence Buell’s incisive phrase, “about the dissonance between the message and the practice of his teaching” was proverbial. 30 Therefore the Transcendentalist crisis of identity was caused by the lack of institutional career opportunities in Massachusetts at the time, but it was nonetheless predetermined by the appealing imperative of Emerson’s views on vocation. The relationship between the lack of career options and Emerson’s soaring poetic-religious aspirations is not however that of simple cause and effect. Transcendentalism was not the natural alternative when nothing else presented itself as a career choice; neither did the impossibility of pursuing a professional path (a path in life) necessarily lead to Transcendentalism. The personal failures of the Transcendentalists were the effect of a discrepancy between ideal and reality, yet this discrepancy was actively desired and searched for – in fact, the very status of the Poet-Priest, the missionary, the prophet, the new messiah, reposed on it. The New England Transcendentalists, as has been mentioned more than once earlier, were moralists with artistic impulses, whose goal was moral edification and improvement. Moreover, they were moralists who, in a typical Puritan New England 29

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, New York: Columbia University Press, 1935, I, 435. 30 Lawrence Buell, Emerson, Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, 308.

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manner, devoted their personal lives to their missionary calling, even when the latter was perceived in such clearly poetic dimensions. Thus their crisis of identity was to a great extent predetermined by their choice to become spiritual leaders whose mission was to improve a dissatisfying world – by their choice to be different, to be above, beyond this world, to transcend it. And such a choice implied pursuing an unconventional path, while following the dictates of their extensive culture, their intellectual refinement and literary impulses. Such a behavior placed the Transcendentalists in the typically Romantic role of opposition, justified from the point of view of high morality, understood as high personal morals, in their turn, understood as a form of art, or as creativity. Indeed, reasons for being in opposition to their contemporary world there were plenty; the lack of appropriate career opportunities was far from being the only one. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, America, and particularly New England, was undergoing intense industrialization; Americans seemed to be more than ever fired by the idea of worldly success. The phrase “Boston’s prosperity” came to signify unprecedented progress even outside of Massachusetts. 31 But not so for the Transcendentalists – precisely when material well-being came to be held in high regard, the Transcendentalists began to speak of the “ignorance”, “mistake” and “quiet desperation”32 of their fellow men. Their Romantic gesture in response was to lift themselves beyond everyday reality through art, commensurate in itself with high morality. In Emerson’s yellow house in Concord, one followed the imperative of the absolute, with chosen men of one’s own kind, in an atmosphere unlike that on the outside. There, one could be different, be other, by calling and by conviction. If the Transcendentalists had perceived only art as their high calling, even if still considering it the manifestation of moral character, their relationships with one another, passing through the identification with the ideal, would probably have been less intense, and their individual lives would probably have formed something different than a series of personal failures. But the New England Transcendentalists chose priesthood on a par with poetry; they ordained the poet in them a pastor. As Lawrence Buell insightfully observes: 31 32

See Tindall with Shi, America, 478. Thoreau, Walden, 5.

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Nevertheless, the Transcendentalists knew not only the personal tragedy of their inability to pursue a real career but also the poetic heights of their true calling. If in their own times they were often seen as eccentrics who failed dramatically, “in prospect”, to the generations to follow, they presented a poetic spirituality refined to perfection.

33

Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 53.

PART TWO TRANSCENDENTALISM AND ROMANTICISM

CHAPTER SIX THE NEW ENGLAND HORIZONS OF POST-KANTIANISM: EMERSON I told Carlyle on the way to Stonehenge that ... though I was dazzled by the wealth and power and success everywhere apparent [in England] – yet I knew very well that the moment I return to America, I should lapse again into the habitual feeling which the vast physical influences of that continent inevitably inspire of confidence that there and only there is the right home and seat of the English race.1

I A Bostonian and a Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson established a strong correlation between his native New England and a new intellectual and spiritual mindset. Emersonian Transcendentalism was a phenomenon of New England – not simply because it was part of the intellectual flourishing which swept America’s East Coast in the first decades of the nineteenth century, but, first and foremost, because it inherited the sense of high mission which came down from the very first settlers in Massachusetts. The Poet-Priest could not have been born anywhere else: outside of New England he would have been inconceivable. The intellectual climate created by Harvard University, the open horizons for spiritual exchange with fellow thinkers across the Atlantic did not undermine, but, on the contrary, quickened the perception of the value of strictly New England traditions and moral categories – to such an extent that the image of the modern intellectual at the time emerged as the reincarnation of the spiritual leader from the old days, the Puritan pastor. Emerson’s concept of the Poet-Priest, to a large degree, implied the formulation of a sense of heritage, enriched and fructified by the influence of European Romanticism. It 1

Emerson, The Complete Works, V, 275.

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is important to underline that the intellectual and aesthetic currents coming from Europe in the early nineteenth century could exert their fertile influence over Emerson’s idea precisely in New England, where the missionary spirit of the first settlers was undergoing a true renaissance in the free-minded environment of Jacksonian democracy – and, more precisely, in the unique intellectual climate of Boston and its surrounding towns. With his idea of the Poet-Priest, Ralph Waldo Emerson created for his co-thinkers and followers “a vocation and a form”, 2 becoming, despite the complexity of relationships and differing views, the unquestionable leader of the movement and a figure of inspiration for decades to follow. Educated for a priest, like most of the Transcendentalists, Emerson publicly resigned from the pulpit and left the church of his forefathers in order to remain true to their spirit: he believed that forms emptied of meaning were a heavy and useless burden. Having rejected institutions of all kinds, he declared himself “a scholar”, by which he meant “an intellectual” – a free, independent, entirely self-reliant individual devoted to his creative work. Protestantism without the institution of the church, spiritual leadership without the institution of the pulpit, democracy of and for the spirit – these were the values Emerson preached for his “American scholar” (“The American Scholar”), whom he would soon call “a Poet” (“The Poet”), making it clear that the new figure of the free creative intellectual, under one name or another, though still more of an ideal than a reality, had already come into existence. Moreover, this new figure had a distinctly American identity. “Here, here in America, is the Home of Man”, Emerson wrote in his essay “The Fortune of the Republic”,3 asserting that it was not simply the American, the man in America, who represented something significant, but Man as America. 4 Emerson’s “scholar” was not everyman and, importantly, did not belong to any or all places; his value was based exclusively on the fact that he belonged to a place – to America. And his quality of belonging did not merely translate the consciousness of New England’s history and customs, but encompassed the old Puritans’ global vision of the New World as the 2

Sherman Paul, Repossessing and Renewing: Essays in the Green American Tradition, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976, 1. 3 Emerson, The Complete Works, XI, 540. 4 Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 157.

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New Jerusalem, as the realization of the age-old European dream, from John’s Book of Revelation, for “a new sky and a new land”. It comprehended the first settlers’ vision of the future, kept alive through the centuries, which saw “American selfhood as an identity in progress, advancing from prophecies performed towards paradise to be regained”. 5 This understanding of the significance of belonging was quite specific: it built on the deeply rooted belief, at the origin of a strong New England tradition, that America was the apocalypse beyond horror and destruction; at the same time, it implied personal identification with the “genius of the place”, with the spirit of America, itself understood as the fulfillment of the vision at the end of the New Testament. The consciousness of the genius loci of America, by tradition carried within it the Puritan settlers’ vision of the world, as well as their proud sense of sublime spiritual mission. It also represented a particular kind of exceptionality, which stimulated and lent stature to individual presence, to personal character. As Emerson passionately proclaims in “The American Scholar”: Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.6

In fact, for Emerson, there was no difference between the American scholar, the Transcendentalist and the Poet – these were only the different names given to the personification of the same powerful intellectual energy and vitality, the same infinite freedom of spirit and creative talent, which found their correspondence, and could unfold fully, according to Emerson, only in the boundless expanses of the New World. This ideal harmony, Emerson believed, counteracted the listless European “courtly muses”, the weary and exhausted, overburdened, superannuated Europe. All Transcendentalists from Emerson onwards adopted the same attitude. Rightfully born in New England, the Transcendentalist Poet-Priest, however, was endowed also with something else: the artistic impulse, the intellectual breadth and refinement of the early nineteenth century. Such brilliant combination was extraordinarily attractive, most importantly because 5 6

Ibid., 143. Emerson, Selected Essays, 99.

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it provided a steady native ground for outside foreign influences. “He [Emerson]”, Sherman Paul aptly points out, “transformed the narrow notion of character as the limitation of self into the wider notion of personality as the expansive expression of self”.7 Emerson took the Puritan emphasis on shaping and building moral character and refocused it upon a supra-institutional, free-spirited poetic praise of God in man. The church temple was left behind and a new temple opened its gates – the temple of Nature, of American nature. Emerson’s Poet-Priest took his pulpit and boldly moved it to its new temple. In order to accomplish such a step and see within himself the Poet, the God-like self, the scholar, the intellectual, the artist-creator, the new spiritual leader, he needed a new kind of introspection, but also a new, modern-day reevaluation of tradition. Consequently, tradition was formulated as the visibility which remained invisible until the advent of Transcendental consciousness and which, thus reborn, focused on the existential and creative capacities of the individual self – whose fulfillment was possible solely in the truth of nature. Emerson’s first major work was, significantly, titled Nature because “beauty in nature … is the herald of inward and eternal beauty”, or even more precisely, because “Nature is the vehicle of thought ... the symbol of spirit”.8 “Emerson's Nature is an important adaptation of natural theology to post-Kantian Romantic thought”, Sacvan Bercovitch insightfully observes.9 Thus, when Emerson ardently pleads for “new lands, new men, new thoughts”,10 when, at the very beginning of Nature, he calls for original freshness and truth, he is in fact describing the complex situation in which the spirited, sensitive, creative individual at the time found himself. This situation is typically Romantic – the very necessity of unmediated, new kinds of relationships between self and non-self already belies the disintegration of the old, codified, conventional ways in which the self connected with the social and cosmic orders. At its basis, both as cause and effect, lies the isolation of the individual, his retreat into the solitude of his imagination – with all the dangers, challenges and temptations projected by the awareness of self-confinement onto the domains of art, self-cultivation and self7

Paul, Repossessing and Renewing, 3. Emerson, Selected Essays, 27. 9 Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 152. 10 Emerson, Selected Essays, 15. 8

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transfiguration. Emerson’s public resignation from the pulpit signaled precisely that the old idea of identification with the institution had disintegrated. And the displacement of the temple of God from the man-made sanctuary of the church to the infinity of nature was a rightful existential and creative choice – the grand metaphor for the grand transformation: The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? .... Let us inquire, to what end is nature?11

With his fiery rhetoric in these lines from the opening of Nature, Emerson in no way rejected the Puritan tradition of New England, but, on the contrary, pleaded for the rebirth of his great forefathers’ spirituality. In this specific sense, the “American Renaissance” is a fitting name for American Transcendentalism. The “tradition” Emerson opposes is a later phenomenon, which ushered in the new times, burying the mind in retrospection, depriving it of perception of the present. That is why the antithesis of that tradition becomes “religion by revelation”, insight – the insight of the poet and the philosopher, of the American Scholar, the Poet-Priest, the New England Intellectual of the early nineteenth century, who, inevitably, by the sheer force of his spiritual stature, feels isolated (but also consciously, with a certain delight, emphasizes his isolation) from everything spiritless, fossilized and lethargic, from everything “traditional”. This new gaze into oneself, into the limitlessness of the imagination, lit by inspired intuition, presupposes the elevated point of view of intellectual grandeur and refinement, or the isolation of the creative individual, arduously maintained by himself. This Romantic set-up was already a fact in New England. It was instigated by the Transatlantic currents of post-Kantian thought, but it was also itself instigating the opening up of new horizons which only the New World could offer as a possible outlet for the already irreversible processes of self-transformation. Individualism in New England was influenced by post-Kantian thought, which reached America’s coasts through the works of the British Romantics; but it was, above all, a spiritual 11

Ibid., 15.

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renaissance of New England identity, already centered around the limitless creative potential of the self. (Following the example of Emerson, this renewal of spirit was undertaken with a seriousness which – given the radical incompatibility between their sense of calling and the actual career options at the time – led to many tragic failures among the Transcendentalists.) Emerson overcame the wingless retrospection of his contemporaries by extending his gaze even further backwards, towards the very foundations of New England identity. He revived these foundations for his time, fulfilling thereby a need to see America as a home-land, with numberless advantages. His Poet could not be but also a Priest – the poet-priest of those “higher laws” about which Thoreau would write not long after, and which to all Transcendentalists would appear possible to implement only in the promised – the real – land of New England, and America as a whole: in the wild American nature, in “its ample geography [which] dazzled the imagination, and … [would] not wait long for metres”. 12 Emerson placed his newly sanctified Transcendentalist pulpit precisely in the pristine nature of the New World; only there could “the poetry and philosophy of insight” be created, only there could “the new thoughts” be professed, and preached. 13 “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close”, 14 Emerson proclaimed with inspiration, thus marking the beginning of a new chapter in the biography of the American Scholar. II Clearly, the New England intellectual of the early nineteenth century saw himself in a typically Romantic situation, characterized by the isolation of the artist within his imagination, by dissatisfaction with the relationships traditionally established between individual, society and the universe at large, by the search for new interrelations between self and non-self, by Romantic escapes into nature and creativity, by reverence towards art, by the blissful seductions of poetic solitude. Emerson, the voice and the authority figure of this reviving New England, took in and transmitted many of the views of his 12

Emerson, Selected Essays, 222. Ibid., 15. 14 Ibid., 82. 13

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Transatlantic co-thinkers, the British Romantics. It was indeed Emerson’s constructive reading of the works of Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth which made possible their direct influence on American literature. In fact, along with bringing clear awareness of intellectual and poetic similarities and of the possibility of maintaining aesthetic affinities, Emerson’s mediation proved so productive since it always manifested a deliberate distancing from English Romanticism. During the several decades of fruitful intellectual exchange with his British contemporaries, Emerson never lost his critical attitude – the consciousness of his own worth as far surpassing the mere role of a talented follower. And thanks to this constant critical re-evaluation, thanks to this American otherness, repeatedly highlighted throughout the years, and with the ever captivating force of the rhetoric of preaching, Emerson’s works became “a compendium of iconographies that have gotten into American writers who may never have liked or even read him”.15 Thoreau would very soon follow the example of Emerson exactly in differentiating himself from the British Romantics. Precisely in the awareness of these differences, Emerson saw America’s advantages – advantages “correspondent” (his term) to the open expanses, the freshness, the overflowing vitality of the New World. He continuously pleaded for wholeness, combining, through his captivating language and astounding spiritual breadth, the post-Kantian ideas of Romanticism with the natural theology traditionally associated with America’s worldview. The relation between the two was for Emerson equally “original”, natural, fundamental, unmediated, as that “original relation to the universe”16 which the Transcendentalist vision aimed to achieve, and as that unmediated interdependence between Transcendentalist spirituality and “the genius of a place”. That “place” in Emerson was invariably New England – invariably America. Therefore, Emerson not only perceived the differences between him and his co-thinkers across the Atlantic, but also, most importantly, felt the need to maintain, and to underline constantly, his distance from them – he saw the geographical distance as a difference in essence. The prefix “trans” for Emerson, as well as for most of the Transcendentalists, implied also “beyond” all affinities with authors 15

David Porter, Emerson and Literary Change, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978, 50. 16 Emerson, Selected Essays, 15.

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on the other side of the ocean – not only differentiating one’s own personal identity, but emphasizing the properly New England character of that identity. Precisely for this reason Emerson’s approach towards his British contemporaries, undertaken, like everything else with the Transcendentalists, with utmost seriousness, was so productively influential in American culture – not so much for the originality of the ideas, but rather for its intellectual and artistic brilliance, as well as for the sense of American belonging it proudly declared essential for both personal and creative reasons. Emerson’s critical attitude was above all the expression of inner resistance, of struggle against that “inevitable contemporary presence ... whose very power, currency, and appeal made it difficult for them [for Emerson and Thoreau] to be authentically New English themselves”.17 And for Emerson – the inspired and inspiring spiritual leader of the time of Jacksonian democracy, who wanted to revive the faith of the old pilgrims – there was nothing more important than that. Very indicative in this respect is an entry in Emerson’s Journal, written in 1833 (he was only thirty years old), on his return from Europe, where he had met Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Landor, all three already quite advanced in age. Wordsworth “made the impression of a very narrow and very English mind”, Emerson observes, while Coleridge appeared to him “old and preoccupied” and unable to “bend to a new companion and think with him”. Only his meeting with Carlyle proved to bear fruit and led to decades-long correspondence. “Not one of these is a mind of the very first class”, Emerson concluded, “they are … all deficient, – in insight into religious truth”.18 This entry note registers a choice, a moment of selfdetermination. Emerson felt relief to be back from England to his native Concord, having overcome what appeared then as obligatory reverence towards the British authors. What was perceived as “English”, and what America in general defined itself against, now implied that the influence of British Romanticism would translate into the necessity of conscious distance. Emerson’s reasons were stated openly: the mind of the English Romantics was too English, meaning too narrow, blind to the “higher laws” of that ultimate truth, which he, significantly enough, called “religious”. Emerson had come out of the 17

James McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Shifting Stance toward Nature, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1974, 59. 18 Emerson, The Journals, III, 186.

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shadow of the British Romantics and, once liberated, was ready to create the image of the American Scholar, or the Poet-Priest, ready to write Nature and sing the praise of “new lands, new men, new thoughts”.19 “More than any other poet”, Emerson would write about Wordsworth a decade later, “his success has been not his own but that of the Idea or principle which he shared with his coevals and which he has rarely succeeded in adequately expressing”. 20 The “Idea” in question can generally be defined as unity with nature achieved through the self-devoted act of the imagination. This is what Emerson always acknowledged and esteemed in Wordsworth – his contribution in expanding the human perception of nature. “I count the genius of Swedenborg and Wordsworth”, he wrote in “Poetry and Imagination”, “as the agents of reform in philosophy, the bringing back to the marrying of Nature and mind, undoing the old divorce in which poetry had been famished and false, and nature had been suspected and pagan”.21 This claim makes it more than clear that Emerson’s attitude towards nature was directly influenced by Wordsworth (and not by the German philosophers and poets); that for Emerson, and for all New England intellectuals during the nineteenth century, Wordsworth was the modern poet of nature. Indeed, Wordsworth’s influence is strongly present in almost everything Emerson wrote (especially after he read the convincing defense of Wordsworth’s poetry in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria). In examining in detail the ramifications of the idea of poetic selffulfillment in nature, the comparison between the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Emerson’s Nature, repeatedly drawn by literary critics,22 can show the proximity of the two authors’ views – on the role of the poet as a mediator who expresses the relation of man to the universe, on the value of natural beauty, on the original essence of nature as that which allows man to re-discover himself, on nature as a sanctuary for “great and tranquil thoughts”. And if the parallel is extended to include Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, “Michael”, the Lucy poems, and especially “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, and Emerson’s 19

Emerson, Selected Essays, 15. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoughts on Modern Literature”, The Dial (1844); rpt. The Dial, New York: Russel and Russel, 1961, I, 150. 21 Emerson, The Complete Works, VIII, 27. 22 Linden Peach, Perry Miller, M.H. Abrams, Lawrence Buell, David Porter are among the many critics who have produced such comparative studies. 20

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“Poetry and Imagination”, “Self-Reliance”, “The Over-Soul”, the Journals, “Parnassus”, and “Woodnotes”, it becomes evident that the affinity between the two is also in their shared sense of tranquility, their aspirations towards a transcendent reality, beyond time and death, their reverence towards humble life and simple, authentic men living among “the elements”. Curiously, in all of these comparisons, the critics rely on the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, but also, to a great extent, on Wordsworth’s poetry, whereas in the case of Emerson, with the exception of “Woodnotes”, reference is made exclusively to his essays. The most apparent reason for such critical preference is the fact that Emerson is not as good a poet as Wordsworth. Yet, the deeper reason is given by Emerson himself – namely, that he valued Wordsworth for his ideas and not for their expression in poetry, which he rarely saw as “adequate” (another proof, by the way, that Wordsworth was important in disseminating the ideas of German Transcendental thought in America). Moreover, in distinguishing – somewhat strangely at first glance – the significant from the inadequate in Wordsworth, Emerson was implying a Romantically tinted contrastive self-observation: his own excessive inclination towards abstraction (which, in fact, made Wordsworth’s mind appear limited and “too English”), along with his incapacity – which created an unceasing, at times dramatic desire – for immediate sensory experience. “I am somehow receptive of the great soul”, he wrote in his Journal, “and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars”.23 Emerson’s struggle against the powerful influence of Wordsworth worked in both directions – he appropriated those of Wordsworth’s ideas which he approved, filling them with the sense of openness and spatial grandeur, and, at the same time, consciously desisted from writing poems in the style of his British counterpart. He preached about “the philosophy of insight” and “religion by revelation”, announcing the end of “our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands”; yet, “he never sought the same close intermingling of mind and nature which is the subject of Wordsworth's best work”.24 Emerson’s resistance seems perfectly consistent – he found the ideas good but lacking in breadth, while the poetry seemed to him rarely apt 23

Emerson, The Journals, II, 123. Linden Peach, British Influence on the Birth of American Literature, London: Macmillan, 1983, 46. 24

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and so was discarded as a possible model. This approach is visible in Emerson’s essays and Journals, as well as in his poetry. Evidently the desire to distance himself from that “inevitable contemporary presence” was so strong that it made Emerson ready to re-formulate the fundamental problem of his own creativity (a problem of which he was fully aware). In stating that he was “receptive to the great soul” but tended to “overlook the sun and stars”, Emerson was expressing mostly a profound sorrow in discovering the limits of his own poetic abilities. But these words almost imperceptibly define the parameters of any comparison between the two authors. In order to qualify Wordsworth as “a narrow mind” and to claim that his poetry “belittles the mind”,25 Emerson obviously considered the excessive abstraction in his own thinking an advantage; very soon, he would duly see that abstraction in correspondence with the “ample geography” of America. However, in examining the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and inevitably comparing himself to his younger cothinker, Emerson acknowledged Thoreau’s intense sensitivity: “In reading him [Thoreau], I find the same thought, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond, and illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generality.”26 In this case, abstract thinking is clearly not perceived as an advantage, but, on the contrary, as an insurmountable limitation, which impedes the attainment of wholeness, the dissolving unity with the elements. (And precisely because he was well aware of his limitations, Emerson was the first to take the right approach to reading Thoreau.) It turns out that the same characteristic is qualified in two radically opposed ways – through the juxtaposition with transatlantic influences and through America’s own prism. The genius loci of New England obviously played a role here as well, and this may have been one more way to mark the end of America’s “long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands”. Moreover, that the end of foreign apprenticeship partly morphed into the deeply personal problem of creativity in Emerson once again affirms the power of New England culture as a culture traditionally centered on the self. Apart from his consciously maintained distance from British Romanticism, it is worth considering in what ways exactly Emerson diverged from the dangerously powerful influence of Wordsworth. If 25 26

Emerson, The Journals, I, 59. Emerson, The Complete Works, IX, 522.

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it is beyond question that the communion with nature in Emerson never reaches the deep intimacy of Lyrical Ballads, then the conclusion imposes itself that “the vast geography of America ... obviated for Emerson ... the possibility of a relationship with nature as close and as intimate as that of the Lyrical Ballads”, and hence that “Emerson’s own emphasis upon a transcendental reality is stronger ... than Wordsworth’s and is primarily responsible for the greater distance between himself and nature than between Wordsworth and nature”.27 As Emerson himself notes in Nature: The poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine-trees, the river, the bank of flowers before him do not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere.28

Emerson’s gaze is fixed upon an abstract reality which cannot be experienced through the senses – and which it is impossible to describe in concrete terms; he never departs from the idea that Nature is the true Idealist (“Poetry and Imagination”). Wordsworth also shows a strong inclination towards idealism, which threatens to disturb his “balance”, his “combination” (“intermingling”) with nature. The idealist in Wordsworth does not always easily co-exist with the prophet of nature; the dialectic of love at times conflicts with his “apocalyptic” yearning – not for a loving relationship with nature, but for transcendence beyond it, nourished by “a nostalgia for a preconscious glory”. 29 But whereas these “apocalyptic” states in Wordsworth carry the danger of unbalancing the deep intimacy of his communion with the natural world, in Emerson, for whom such intimacy remains inaccessible, these states correspond to the cool abstraction of his aesthetics: “I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God.”30 And his cold aesthetics grows warmer not when the impossibility of intimacy is experienced dramatically (for instance, when he compares himself with Thoreau), but when he fills with fiery exaltation before the infinite spaces of America, which, for him, correspond to the infinite imagination of the 27

Peach, British Influence on the Birth of American Literature, 49-50. Emerson, Selected Essays, 25. 29 See Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Unmediated Vision, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954, 10. 30 Emerson, Selected Essays, 18. 28

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American Scholar, or the American poet. This is where balance is to be established for Emerson. Vastness – both Transcendental and physical – constitutes his American perspective, his singularly American measure of things. Always and everywhere, Emerson’s views and judgment are imbued with “the love of the Vast”. And, sure enough, Emerson could not find such love in the “good many volumes of British Classics”, 31 nor in Wordsworth. The two authors did not cherish the same New Jerusalem. If the sense of space has come to differentiate by definition English from American poets of nature, 32 it was Emerson, the exalted bard from the dawn of American democracy, who first drew the demarcation line – and in a way that has continued to exercise extraordinary attraction. He did this consciously, with great rhetorical talent, never losing from view the idea of a proud American identity. That was why, despite the strong influences from across the Atlantic, which he experienced and never denied, Emerson zealously maintained his critical attitude, the space between him and his British contemporaries. This is very clear in his relationship with Wordsworth, and it is no less clear in his relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle. Moreover, the influence of these two authors on Emerson was so strong that it required an even more intense effort of self-preservation. The intellectual brilliance and breadth of both Coleridge and Carlyle evoked the deepest respect in Emerson, so his need to distance himself pertained to the much more difficult sphere of thought. Hence, inevitably, the parameters defining the distance in question changed. The critical tradition has already established the role of Coleridge and Carlyle in disseminating German Transcendental thought in American literature. It is well known that during the 1820s and 1830s many of America’s intellectuals owed their knowledge of German philosophy and literature to the essays of Thomas Carlyle published in the then leading periodicals (The Edinburgh Review, Frazer’s Magazine), as well as to Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and Aids to Reflection. It has been noted that, significantly, Aids to Reflection was published in America as an introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Furthermore, it is clear that Coleridge and Carlyle contributed to the growth of American literature, mostly thanks to Emerson’s 31 32

Emerson, The Complete Works, IX, 440. Peach, British Influence on the Birth of American Literature, 57.

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creative references to their works.33 All critical comparisons between the three authors easily locate the conceptual similarities between them. Thus, although disappointed by their meeting in London, only a year later, in a lecture entitled “Modern Aspects of Letters” (1834), Emerson undertook to analyze Coleridge’s works and claimed, with evident respect, that Coleridge’s greatest merits were in “the allimportant distinction between Reason and Understanding, the distinction of an Idea and a Conception; between Genius and Talent; between Fancy and Imagination, of the nature and end of poetry”.34 These Emerson appropriated in his own work, giving to critics ample, and often employed, bases for comparison. It has been noted repeatedly that the two authors exhibited similar preference for polarity in thought – with the necessary caveat that the duality between Understanding and Soul was deeply ingrained in America’s literary consciousness, and that, encouraged by Coleridge’s writing, Emerson gave it the most accurate expression. 35 It has also been emphasized that the idea of the unity of all essences beyond the world of phenomena was elaborated in Emerson’s “The Over-Soul” even more intensely than in Coleridge, since, inspired by the freshness of his sense of space, by the freedom and possibilities of the New World, Emerson saw the soul and the universe as part of a continuous, endless process. 36 Similar conclusions have been drawn in examining Emerson’s elaboration of the idea of “organic poetry”, first introduced by Coleridge. Coleridge saw the ground for such poetry in “the rules of the imagination [which were] themselves the very powers of growth and production”, 37 while Emerson asserted that “rightly, poetry is organic”.38 Critics have often, correctly, seen in Emerson’s formulation not merely the influence of the British poet, but rather a new conceptual representation of the infinite possibilities offered by the New World. For, as this particularly apt statement affirms, in 33

Ibid., 58. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3 vols, eds Robert E. Spiller, Stephen E. Whicher, and Wallace E. Williams, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959-1972, I, 89. 35 Porter, Emerson and Literary Change, 50. 36 Peach, British Influence on the Birth of American Literature, 62. 37 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001, 674-81. 38 Emerson, The Complete Works, VIII, 31. 34

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America “free verse [was] as inevitable as the Declaration of Independence”.39 The inevitable comparisons with Thomas Carlyle follow a very similar pattern. Thus, Emerson’s claim in Nature that “particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts”40 unmistakably leads to Sartor Resartus and Carlyle’s belief that “the universe is but one vast symbol of God”. 41 Carlyle’s influence on the fundamental ideas in Emerson’s works is beyond dispute: these include the notion of the poet as a prophet and a hermit, isolated from his contemporaries by the strength of his talent and his devotion to truth; the idea of the inherent dignity and spirit of man, the belief that the greatest ill of their time was the loss of faith in the invisible and the fixation on things visible only, etc. And always and everywhere, the juxtaposition between the two authors imposes the conclusion that Emerson assimilated productively Carlyle’s ideas, transforming them in view of their relevance to his contemporary America – by emphasizing the prophetic vision of the poet-priest, which had to encompass the vast expanse of the New World; by relating his fervent conviction in the inherent dignity of man to the intellectual climate of America, which during the Jacksonian democracy maintained great faith in the infinite potential of the human spirit; by far surpassing in his inspired optimism Carlyle’s “Everlasting Yea”; or by seeing nature as the symbol of spirit and also America as the true “Poem”. With all the obvious conceptual similarities between Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle and Emerson, it is clear that Emerson Americanized the ideas of his English contemporaries. This Americanization was necessarily linked to the vast space of the New World, its democracy, its freedom and its faith – all of which have become emblems of America and, moreover, also thanks to Emerson. Although such a reading appears well grounded, without the necessary discriminations, it may give a deceptively flattened image of Emerson’s critical attitude towards the British Romantics. As mentioned earlier, Emerson’s Journal testifies that his reaction to the three authors was quite different: he was the most critical of 39

Edwin Fussell, Lucifer In Harness: American Meter, Metaphor, and Diction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973, 11. 40 Emerson, Selected Essays, 27. 41 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, New York: W.W. Norton, 1962, 1417.

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Wordsworth, while recording no sharp criticism of Coleridge, and showing, in fact, a special liking for Carlyle. Two of his works, Lectures on the Times (1841) and Representative Men (1850), practically borrow their titles, main themes and ideas from two of Carlyle’s major texts. Underlying this difference in attitude towards the three authors are the nuances, the parameters and the scope of Emerson’s consciously maintained otherness as an American and a New Englander. Thus, while the abstractness of his thought made Wordsworth’s warm intimacy with nature inaccessible, Emerson, seemingly with relief (justified by the very nature of New England) substituted a disadvantage for a preference, disguising a difficult creative dilemma which in other cases he did not hesitate to acknowledge. It is possible that it was precisely his yearning for what was out of his reach that made Emerson’s attitude towards Wordsworth so intensely negative: his criticism of the English poet was too harsh to be motivated solely by the impersonal exigencies of a newly created American identity, thus suggesting the influence of a profoundly personal emotional affinity. Why else would Emerson demonstrate in such a radical manner his distance from Wordsworth – something he did not feel necessary to do with either Coleridge or Carlyle? With the latter two the relationship lay on different foundations – their influence was felt on the highest intellectual level, and so, went beyond emotion. In the domain of thought, Emerson could never feel threatened. Hence the calm, emotionally neutral adaptation of Coleridge’s and Carlyle’s ideas to the vast spaces of America, the “grounding” of their philosophy in the “ample geography” of the New World. Emerson still felt the need to distance himself, but the parameters of his distance from Carlyle and Coleridge were different. His personal meeting with them in London brought disappointment, but the intellectual exchange could develop nonetheless: the conceptual correspondences with the two thinkers proved too strong. Emerson managed to differentiate himself in another way, by personifying their ideas, whereas Emerson’s emotional criticism of Wordsworth contained a personal element which had something to do with his own poetic limitations. In the case of Carlyle’s and Coleridge’s influence, that personal element of resistance, motivated by a kind of intellectual self-preservation, took the form of personification: out of the idea Emerson created an image whose

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embodiment he searched for (naturally, in vain) in America’s reality. The ideal image of the American Scholar, of the Man Thinking, of the Seer and Sayer – of the Poet-Priest – was thus brought into existence. Emerson rarely used impersonal notions such as “poetry”, “prose”, “imagination”, “song”, and so on. When he did use such terms, they were invariably with reference to the poet, the inspired creator, the light-bearer, the language maker. To write something that could carry the title Biographia Literaria seems impossible in the case of Emerson. Here is, for instance, the distinction he makes in an essay with an impersonal enough title, “Poetry and Imagination”: “the poet affirms the laws, prose busies itself with exceptions, – with the local and individual.” 42 Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle, Emerson does not oppose “poetry” to “prose”; neither does he oppose “the poet” to “the prose-writer”, as could have been expected. His antinomy consists of two notions belonging to different categories, where the embodied is portrayed as positive, and the impersonal as negative. Such a distinction appears here by no accident; its purpose is to intensify the contrast. For Emerson’s system of values was based on the great Puritan tradition of New England which emphasized the central role of the spiritual leader, of strong personality, and which put the greatest stress on the building of character. Emerson would also add to this tradition the extreme Romantic individualism of his time. If American Transcendentalism can rightly be seen as the natural offspring of New England’s Unitarianism, 43 that fact in itself unambiguously explains why Emerson thought that all of the British Romantics lacked “insight into religious truth”. Emerson’s response, which came in no time, was the notion of the Poet-Priest. But before he could take that conceptual step, he needed to do something else – he needed to free himself, his own person and his own life in order to make them equal in worth to the dignity of his ideas. His resignation from the church pulpit was not simply an exemplary public act meant to inspire others. It was above all an act of self-cleansing, a Romantic self-initiation into the knighthood of “higher laws”. Just as Emerson’s personal meeting with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle helped him overcome their inevitable influence, his personal choice of a worthy career proved to be a catharsis, which allowed him to redefine himself as a person and a thinker. To bring 42 43

Emerson, The Complete Works, VIII, 32. See Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 21-53.

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real personality, real life in correspondence with the ideal construct of the Poet-Priest constituted an important part of Emerson’s unique quality as a New Englander, and was meant to mirror the correlation continuously maintained between the real vast spaces of America and one’s breadth of thought. Hence the seriousness (typically New England) with which Emerson formulated the equality between one’s personal life and art – the seriousness of his idea of self-reliance and creative solitude in nature. “But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars”, Emerson firmly asserts in Nature, because the heavenly bodies were given to man so that he may have the “perpetual presence of the sublime” and be filled with “reverence”.44 This is the blissful and blessed, free, spiritually fruitful, existential solitude of the artist correlating inner and outer world, which Emerson brilliantly unfolded in theory and continuously searched for, as a fundamental moral imperative, in real life. The starry sky, for Emerson, shines forever over the infinite space of America; but America symbolizes the world, and represents a guarantee for the world’s future. Emerson’s stars, within the universal scale of their significance, cannot but reflect also the light of those other, equally brilliant and unforgettable heavenly bodies. “The starry heavens and the moral law within” – some time before Emerson, in Königsberg, Immanuel Kant had named these the two things that “fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe”.45 Emerson was greatly influenced by Kantian thought and by its reincarnations in the British Romantics; the originality of his thinking, however, remains commensurate only with the ever receding horizons of the American landscape. “I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow”, perhaps more to the point Herman Melville observes: “Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture, he is an uncommon man.”46 III An uncommon man, moreover, who felt a constant impulse to grasp ideas as living things, personify abstractions, and transform them into 44

Emerson, Selected Essays, 17. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, London: Longmans, Green, 1883, 260. 46 Herman Melville, Letter to Evert Duyckinck, 3 March 1849, in The Letters of Herman Melville, eds Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960, 79. 45

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images; who would set forth an apotheosis of “the poet” – but not “A Defense of Poetry”. There is less temporal distance between Emerson’s “The Poet” (1844) and Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1821) than between “The Poet” and Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. Shelley was also closer to Emerson in age. If in 1833 the stately Wordsworth and Coleridge inevitably appeared too old to the young and vigorous Emerson, perhaps a meeting with Shelley could have proven more gratifying. The two, however, never met in person – Shelley was no longer alive when Emerson visited Europe for the first time. Nevertheless, it is highly unlikely that Emerson was not familiar at least with some of Shelley’s work, even if he never mentions his name. It is even more unlikely that he could remain cold and indifferent to Shelley’s poetry – Prometheus Unbound and “The American Scholar” share such similar titanic inspiration. (A more likely hypothesis is that Emerson considered the lack of personal acquaintance with Shelley an obstacle, or that he felt such great spiritual affinity with the poet that he avoided discussing his work in self-preserving silence; or both.) Like Emerson, Shelley inherited the great ideas of Romanticism mostly from the preceding generation of the Lake Poets. But although many basic and obvious similarities can be drawn between Emerson and Shelley, their interpretations of the idea of all ideas of Romanticism differ in significant nuances. More than twenty years after the publication of Lyrical Ballads, Percy Bysshe Shelley thought that it was still necessary to write A Defence of Poetry. Another twenty years later, Emerson thought it even more necessary and wrote “The Poet”. By an irony of fate, the two texts appeared for the first time almost simultaneously, respectively in 1840 and 1844; somehow linked through the chance proximity of their publication, both works fascinated audiences with their clear polemics, the intellectual breadth of their antinomial thinking, their stylistic brilliance and moral engagement. Both essays carried the sense of timeliness and topicality: they were reactions against an old, but still dominant, mode of thinking; but also they attempted to redirect man’s gaze away from what was lowly, ephemeral and worthless, towards the high realms of eternal truth. The two texts were responses to their time, insistent upon their immediate relevance, but affirming the timelessness of the values they defended. At their base stood the typically Romantic (and, to an extent, Christian) idea of a correlation between morality and art: for Shelley,

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poetry was “the organ of the moral nature of man”;47 for Emerson, the poet was a “liberating god”.48 Both authors, in fact, wrote “defenses” and the very writing of such a text constituted a moral act. The high moral purpose of art, for Shelley and Emerson, presupposed the ethical obligation to uphold that purpose; hence the unwavering conviction of their arguments. The premises of their conceptual antinomies included the same radical Romantic binaries: imagination was opposed to reason, spirituality to apathy, truth to appearance, vision to blindness, high morality to ordinary turpitude, art to the fixation on the ephemeral, phenomenon to essence, and so on. To discriminate between values and throw vivid light upon their irreconcilable oppositions amounted to the fulfillment of a sacred moral mission for both Shelley and Emerson. It constituted intellectual resistance, which, understood within Kant’s notion of supreme morality, carried a moral message. A Defence of Poetry and “The Poet” are texts of persuasion, whose power relies not only on logical clarity but above all on the moral content of their arguments. As texts of persuasion they are addressed to a certain audience, and precisely this clear rhetorical orientation makes the measure of their spiritual, highly moral utility – Shelley wrote his defense “on an occasion”, and so did Emerson. Both authors opposed the nonspirituality of their epoch with the eternity of spirit; both felt dissatisfaction with their concrete reality and tried to motivate and inspire others – by means of, and because of, the supreme moral purpose of art. But here precisely a very significant divergence between Shelley and Emerson becomes apparent. Although both use the traditional Romantic opposition between ideal and reality, projecting through it a spiritual message with strong rhetorical impact, their engagement with the concrete situation giving rise to such an opposition is different. Clearly, both condemn their epoch for being anti-poetic, or amoral, but in doing so, Shelley composed a defense of art in general, whereas Emerson transformed his defense of poetry into the apotheosis of the American poet, the representative of that “new nobility … conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles, or by the sword-blade”.49 To 47

Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 1355. 48 Emerson, Selected Essays, 217. 49 Ibid., 223.

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counter the non-spirituality of his English contemporaries Shelley spoke of sublime spirituality beyond time and space; to counter the non-spirituality of his American contemporaries Emerson also spoke of sublime spirituality beyond time and space, but so as to correlate that “beyond” with the immensurability of America’s expanses – which had truly become “visible” to the Transcendentalist gaze. Thus, when Shelley sees the crying need for poetry in “such periods”, when “the body has … become too unwieldy for that which animates it”,50 he uses the plural form on purpose – in order to generalize, to level out and blur the contours of time and space, even if “periods” in this case includes his own times. Emerson does something different when he proclaims, with evident sorrow, “I look in vain for the poet whom I describe”. His statement is not a cool generalization, but an emotionally charged admission. The first person singular form is not merely a rhetorical flourish, but expresses Emerson’s real personal engagement with the “here and now”; a little later in the text he adds, “the genius in America [must know] the value of our incomparable materials”. 51 Emerson does not perceive reality in general, but the concrete American reality which alone, beyond the temporary dissatisfaction it evokes, can make eternal values truly visible. The logical question arises here – visible for whom? Emerson’s rhetorical fervor in “The Poet” never subsides; his ardent rhetoric addresses a real, clearly defined audience. And here, indeed, lies one of the most important differences between the two works: Shelley’s text was written to be read, whereas Emerson’s text was written first and foremost to be heard. Like most of Emerson’s works, “The Poet” was prepared as a lecture, which, after being delivered in front of an audience, was revised as a written essay. Educated to be a preacher, Emerson simply substituted the lecture-hall lectern for the church pulpit, without, even for a moment, losing the oratorical pathos of preaching, the awareness of speaking to a public which sat facing him, listening. Hence the rhetorical intensity of his lecture-essay. The last few paragraphs, directly addressing the audience in the second person, are particularly revealing in this respect. “Doubt not, O poet, but persist”, Emerson pleads: 50 51

Shelley, The Defence of Poetry, 1359. Emerson, Selected Essays, 221.

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Visibility Beyond the Visible Say, ‘It is in me, and shall out’ .… Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy …. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor … the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou, true land-lord! sea-lord! airlord!52

This is an inspired appeal meant to inspire in its own turn. Although claiming that he looks in vain for the poet he describes, in the finale of his essay, Emerson chooses to address the created image-ideal in the imperative, harnessing those energies of language which seem able to conjure up reality, to bring it into existence. The American poet is called upon to fulfill his calling. The great poem of America unfolds its verses before his gaze – he needs only enunciate them, sing them, discovering his true self through the muse’s illumination. The desired effect here depends exclusively on the ability of language to conjure up, as if magically, a new reality; the apostrophe’s purpose is to make things happen. The pleading address does not contradict the melancholy admission earlier in the essay, because the aim is not logical consistency. Building coherent arguments is something foreign to Emerson; he shows dislike for it, both in theory and in practice, and avoids it by conviction, but also because of his inherent impulsiveness. His ardent imperatives in this case constitute the rhetorical representation of a positive will for creativity, entirely oriented towards that will’s potential to become reality. In a typical manner, Emerson achieves the effect through the sweeping movement of personification – this time charging it to an extraordinary degree with the “electricity” (in his own term) of living speech, of the perfect mastery of rhetoric. The appeal “O poet!” has a double addressee: an ideal, explicit one – the image-construct, and a real, implicit one – the actual audience. The explicit, ideal addressee is meant to captivate and attract the real one into itself, and become thereby embodied into reality: visibility beyond the visible and tangible reality converge in Emerson’s uncommonly stirring words. The Poet-Priest seems to come to life, in 52

Ibid., 223-24.

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spirit, flesh and blood, out of the animating breath of rhetorical perfection; Emerson’s speech itself seems to make the Poet real – the vocative utterance calls him up into the actual world. All this is possible only ex cathedra and before an audience in the real sense of the word; the oratorical situation here is not merely the imagination of someone at the writing desk. Emerson is an orator, a lecturer, a preacher, speaking first and foremost to his listeners, and only by extension to his readers. His unique style, which exercises the affective power of the sermon and brings “insight into religious truth”, depends precisely on the magic of the spoken word. (As mentioned earlier, it was, in fact, “insight into religious truth” which Emerson saw as lacking in the British Romantics.) In the final paragraphs of “The Poet”, the second person singular “thou” – Emerson’s glorifying direct apostrophe – takes up anew the third person pronoun, the “he” of “the liberating god” elaborately described earlier, bringing it closer to the audience, by referring it to every individual “I” in it. Moreover, the words seem to assign the supreme spiritual calling they evoke to every “I” in the audience, so that, with a newly inspired gaze, each listener may find himself in the ideal image and find that image within himself. (This effect, by the way, of Emerson’s fervent vocative rhetoric works by extension on the reader as well.) “Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord!” This exulted appeal cannot but also vividly evoke the figure of the speaker, the orator, the one calling upon his listeners, harnessing all the conjuring power of language in order to shape reality into existence. The parallel with one of the major features of the epical form here would not be far-fetched. James Joyce defines it – through the character of Stephen Dedalus – as the positioning of the author/performer “as the centre of the epical event”:53 the epic’s reception is auditory, and the rhapsodist’s voice is indispensable, because the voice transmits the message to its recipients; the physical presence of the reciter – just as that of his audience – is tangible, necessary for the very existence of the song, the poem, and later on, the lecture. The very structure of this kind of discourse contains within itself the oral situation of the epic, which requires the role of the speaker; the rhetorical energy of the written text follows the rhythm of the living voice, the breath of its living 53

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, Viking Press, 1968, 232.

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enunciator. The question here is not so much that Emerson was educated entirely in the spirit of Unitarian Protestantism, but that he possessed an extraordinary personal charisma as a public speaker, his captivating presence at the lectern filling his lecture-sermons with the promise of inspired prophecies. As one of Emerson’s many listeners observed: The originality of his thoughts, the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing … and the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me .... His voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever heard.

Let us add to this eloquent testimony that of another admirer of Emerson: The impression he gave was rather of spiritual than of physical vigor. Six feet tall, with sloping shoulders, flat chest, and long arms and neck, he looked excessively slender in his dark ministerial garb .... Those sitting nearest the platform were commonly struck by the bright, intense blue of Emerson's eyes – such eyes ... as one associated with those of sea captains accustomed to gaze out over huge expanses of sea and sky.

One can hardly ignore in these accounts the emphasis placed on the orator’s physical presence, Emerson’s stature, his voice and blue eyes, as well as his extraordinary spiritual impact, which left the audience at his lectures and sermons – invariably, over more than fifty years – feeling illuminated by “a finer glow than even the climate could give”.54 Emerson’s personal charm amplified exponentially the effect of his inspired speech. The unique wholeness of his person did, indeed, like that of the rhapsodist, stand between his word and its recipients. What is more, this extraordinary wholeness of person was transmitted through his writings, so much so that it continues to ensure their unceasing rhetorical vigor and power of affect. In order to give the conceptual construct force and solidity, to give it, in fact, flesh and blood, life, “electricity”, Emerson saturated it with 54

Quoted in Carlos Baker, Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait, New York: Penguin, 1996, 35-36.

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personality – to a great extent, with his own personality. Logic in this process, as far as it bore any value, represented only a small part of personality. Exulted rhetoric was what gave adequate expression to those personal virtues which elsewhere Emerson called Higher Reason, or Intuition. Hence “the impression of excellence” Emerson’s work emanates,55 transcending any criteria of coherent argumentation or originality of ideas. Emerson personified the notion of poetry, and this personified image is what he handed down to his audience. His Poet entered the real world first in the revelation of Emerson’s inspired address to a real, physical audience, but the Poet acquired substance also by his identification with the living speaker, with the inspired orator-priest that was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Personification here connected the world of ideas with the real world, gaining such intensity in the living voice that it necessitated real temporal and spatial foundations. And Emerson provided them: “O poet! .... the ideal shall be real to thee”, thou shalt be “the genius of America” and America shall be thy genius loci. The spatial dimensions here are definite, while time, sweeping the present into the future, melts into eternity. Emerson is a true descendant of the old Puritan pastors, those who dared envision the actual building of the New Jerusalem, the final transformation of human society which would put an end to history by turning the New World into heaven on earth. Integrating, however, the oral, performative structure of the lecture into the rhetorical make-up of writing, Emerson emphasizes even further the atemporal dimensions of his exulted appeal – by reviving and reinvigorating that most ancient of all function of the epic apostrophe, which is to sing and glorify, and so, immortalize. “Sing, O Muse, of …” seems to reverberate in the background of Emerson’s “O Poet!” – who is called upon to sing of Oregon and Texas, “yet unsung”, of America’s “ample geography [which] dazzles the imagination, and … will not wait long for metres”.56 Emerson’s Poet is America’s; his time is eternity. The idea is identified with the image, the image – with America, and America with the new land under the new sky. Emerson achieves this triple movement by means of the oral situation, which, in its turn, he transposes within the rhetoric of the written essay, conjuring, as if, the image-ideal in reality by saturating it with the temporal and spatial 55 56

See Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 2. Emerson, Selected Essays, 222.

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infinity of America. The exulted finale of Emerson’s essay thus blends into a song meant to create and immortalize at the same time. The tonality of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry is quite different. Shelley’s text, as is evident especially in its final paragraphs, does not follow, in fact consciously avoids, the genre of the treatise. Yet A Defence of Poetry was written as “a refutation of arguments”, as an argumentative exposition, or, in Shelley’s own words, the essay dealt with “poetry in its elements and principles”. 57 The text is indeed a defense – a defense of poetry against its detractors, against the representatives of a nonspiritual epoch. It is furthermore, from a different point of view, a defense of one kind of “mental action”, in Shelley’s terms, against another: a defense of imagination against reason, of the ability to perceive and act upon “the similitudes of things” and not simply upon “the differences”, a defense, finally, of the mind’s ability to get hold of essences – an ability higher than the rational registering of visible phenomena. The influence here of the ideas of Immanuel Kant – an influence selectively mediated through the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge – is evident. What is noteworthy in Shelley’s text, however, is the very formulation of the distinction between the human faculties made somewhat regardless of their owner. Shelley very rarely refers to “the poet”; when he does, he seems to be purposefully avoiding the singular form of the noun, while using the plural form rather as a substitute for the impersonal “poetry”, or for the concept itself. “The hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration” or “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, 58 the poets in Shelley constitute an extremely generalized, absolutely de-personified image. Naturally Shelley does not diverge from the individualism characteristic of the Romantic movement as a whole; his text is simply oriented towards the inspiration of the “I”, and not the “I” of inspiration: towards that state, brought by the imagination, which surpasses beyond measure, according to Shelley the Romantic, what is attainable through reason. Shelley focuses on poetry as “the produce” of that very state, so as to point, in vivid contrast, to what is inaccessible through the other kind of “mental action”, reason. In view of his purpose, it is clear that a possible emphasis on the “Æolian harp”, on the poet as instrument, would have refocused significantly the overall argument of the essay, tipping the 57 58

Shelley, The Defence of Poetry, 1352-53. Ibid., 1350-52.

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balance of Shelley’s otherwise precise and convincingly argued Defence. The differences between Shelley’s and Emerson’s approach are more than evident. What is more, behind Shelley’s essay extends a long English tradition of writing “apologies for poetry”, among them Coleridge’s very own Biographia Literaria, which had a considerable influence on Shelley. America’s old and very own tradition, transpiring in every single line Emerson wrote, is of a quite different kind: this is the autobiographical tradition of the “personal narrative” (to use Jonathan Edwards’ title). In these two traditions lie the deep causes of the radical difference between the two authors which, despite all otherwise conceptual similarities, determined their different approach to a more or less shared problematic. As Daniel Boorstin points out: For Americans, cultural novelty and intellectual freedom were not to mean merely the exchange of one set of idols for another; they meant removal into the open air .... In America what seemed to be needed was not so much a new variant of European “schools” of philosophy as a philosophy of the unexpected .... American life nourished it until it became a prevailing mode. It was not the system of e few great American Thinkers, but the mood of Americans thinking.59

The association here with Emerson’s “American Scholar” is practically unavoidable. Emerson defined his Scholar as “Man Thinking”, visibly stressing the process, the action of thinking, as something necessarily related to his being an American man thinking. The “philosophy of the unexpected”, mirroring in its flexibility and open scope – by necessity, but also with a certain relish – the infinity of America’s forever receding horizons, was not simply historically viable only in the New World and, therefore, unique, but it constantly emphasized its distinctiveness as a unique advantage. This was particularly true in the case of the New England Transcendentalists, who, without exception, never ceased to contrast Europe’s East to America’s West, submerging all connections with the Old World in “the Lethean stream” of the Atlantic (Thoreau) in order to underline all the merits of America’s unique identity. Emerson’s “Scholar” easily becomes “the Poet” of America’s wilderness, of this 59

Boorstin, The Americans, 150-51.

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new land under a new sky – a figure of marvel and inspiration, a figure impossible in Europe. Before him stretches America’s “ample geography [which] dazzles the imagination”, awaiting his exulted song; before his very eyes lies the “unexpected”, and he is a seer endowed with “sublime vision”, 60 “a transparent eye-ball”, as Emerson says in Nature, which “see[s] all”.61 There is no question that Emerson’s notion of the poet (and the notion of the poet for all Transcendentalists) centered around his vision. This focus was to a large extent the response to the challenges of the unexpected, to the ever new emergence of the unknown, which the distant horizons of America revealed to the poet’s gaze. (Here, naturally, the discussion concerns the specific, American – and Americanizing – repeated emphasis on the poet’s extraordinary vision and prophetic role, which otherwise all Romantics shared.) Here is how “the voices from around” echo in the words of Emerson and Shelley: Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar .… It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.62

Shelley’s neo-platonic philosophy, having assimilated Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena, and its reformulations in Wordsworth and especially Coleridge, evidently posits poetry within the opposition “vision”/“blindness”. Emerson, on the other side of the Atlantic, shares completely Shelley’s view, but places the accent elsewhere. Shelley’s opposition between vision and blindness pivots around another binary – that of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The correlation between the two binaries is what defines poetry as that which reveals the unfamiliar in its beauty, saving us from a world hopelessly faded by excessive use, and so, “annihilated in our minds”. Emerson also endows his poet with the ability to “turn the world to glass” 63 and thus reveal and approach true essence; but the widespread blindness, making the world opaque, he has already identified in Nature as the “retrospection” of his age, while pleading, at the same 60

Emerson, Selected Essays, 215. Ibid., 18. 62 Shelley, The Defence of Poetry, 1354-59. 63 Emerson, Selected Essays, 212. 61

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time, for “an original relation to the universe”, for a new commensurability between new men, new thoughts and new lands. The unseeing gaze, which Emerson criticizes as typical for his day and age, has mainly temporal, and not spatial, dimensions. The goal is, in fact, to transform this gaze, disengage it from the blinding futility of an irrecoverable past and turn it towards “the wilderness … the distant line of the horizon, [where] man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature”.64 In this transformation consists the seer’s calling before the dazzling geography of America, the calling of the “American scholar”, the American poet, for: “if I have not found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then in Chalmers’s collection of five centuries of English poets.”65 The poet’s Vision, according to Emerson – or, his Over-Soul, Mind, his Genius – is imbued with the “spirit of the place” of America. Its scope is comparable only with America’s own limitless expanse, with its “groves and pastures”:66 these are waiting for the Poet “yet unsung”, undiscovered, enveloped in “opaqueness”. They are not still unfaded, but still unseen, full of unpredictability and boundless freedom, ready to burst into free verse – if only the eyes would stop roaming “retrospectively” in the past, and soar, instead, into the infinitude of space. For Emerson, unlike Shelley, there is no “universe … annihilated by the recurrence of impressions”; on the contrary, there is a universe whose true impressions are about to be experienced for the first time. This universe is full of the unexpected, the challenges of the unknown – needed is only a Vision which can “correspond” to this universe and recreate the beauty which had initially created it. By the force of his vision, the poet “stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis”.67 The poet’s ability to see, for Emerson, includes plasticity – which both signifies the “action” of creating, and reflects the endless mutability of essences beyond the petrified stillness of appearances. Whereas Shelley’s formulation tends to stasis, Emerson paints a dynamic picture. In Shelley, there is a veiled universe, whose beauty poetry uncovers; in Emerson, there is the awareness of an 64

Emerson, Selected Essays, 18-19. Ibid., 222. 66 Ibid., 223. 67 Ibid., 212. 65

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ongoing process, of the beautiful flowing plasticity of things, wherein the beauty of creation constantly transpires. Shelley speaks of a tired gaze which needs to be reinvigorated; Emerson speaks of a gaze asleep which needs to be awakened. The difference evidently works to the advantage of Emerson’s side of the Atlantic, and is therefore repeatedly underlined by him. Without question, Emerson prefers the slumbering vitality of America to the exhaustion of Europe; he prefers poetry which sets ablaze the fire in “tyrannous” eyes rather than poetry which sharpens (“English”) sight long blunted by reiteration: “For we are not … porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it.”68 Particularly revealing in this respect are the different definitions Emerson and Shelley give of the imagination, for both indubitably the most important of the human faculties. For Shelley, the imagination is “the great instrument of moral good”;69 Emerson, however, despite his belief that morality and art are inseparable, places the emphasis elsewhere: the imagination, he writes, “is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees”.70 Obviously the genius loci, “the genius of the place”, is extremely important to Emerson. He not only equates the “I” with the “eye”, being and seeing, which is, no doubt, a question of morals, but imbues the moral connotations of his formulation with the sense of place. Thus, for both Shelley and Emerson, at the dawn of humanity everything was poetry and every man was, by definition, a poet, because language was poetry itself; but whereas Shelley defines the role of poetry as the unveiling of this truth and the sharpening of our sensibility, Emerson speaks of a rebirth, possible only in the New World, the “true home of Man”, where the “original” relation to the universe, a relation not attenuated by excessive use, can be achieved. Kant’s apriority appears in Shelley despite – or even, against – experience, while in Emerson it relates to a state before experience, experience being viewed exclusively as undesirable, even foreign, historical experience (which, in fact, comes closer to Kant’s original idea, and to the etymology of the word). Clearly, the place of apriority has real, physical dimensions in the mind of the New Englander Emerson. America, the dream of the New Jerusalem come true, the 68

Emerson, Selected Essays, 204. Shelley, The Defence of Poetry, 1355. 70 Emerson, Selected Essays, 215. 69

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new beginning for all humanity – here, in this unique opportunity to relate to the substance of things, to look at the stars without the mediation of previous experience, Emerson’s Poet is called upon “to see”, to draw all vital force, and thus become the inspired New Adam, the “land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord!” of the new world. His poetry will need no defense, because – as inspired creator, drawing on the beginning of all beginning – he himself, the Man, “is all” (“The American Scholar”); charged with the “electricity” of an unused universe of bursting vitality, he will awaken and sing it: Emerson evokes him in his inspired appeal “The Poet”.

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CHAPTER SEVEN THE VISION OF THE NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALIST: THOREAU The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World ....1

I “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost.”2 These words from Thoreau’s Walden suggest a literary dialogue and explicitly point to the opposition between the two parties: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Ode to Dejection” is evoked only to be rejected. Hardly any study of American Transcendentalism fails to place Thoreau’s work within “the context of international Romanticism”.3 But despite his unquestionably Romantic disposition, in his essays and his Journal, Thoreau conscientiously avoided direct references to Wordsworth, Coleridge or Carlyle. What is more, just as Emerson, who jealously embraced his New England identity, Thoreau came to see the Atlantic as a psychologically necessary spatial separation, which, with the passage of years, acquired for him – as an individual – existential significance. From this perspective, the only text by Thoreau bearing on his British fellow-thinkers, the essay “Thomas Carlyle and His Works”, merits particular attention. Great Britain did not represent for Thoreau any special attraction: he would have gladly gone “to Oregon, but not to London”. 4 Captivated by America’s wild nature, he chose to 1

Thoreau, The Essays, 125. Thoreau, Walden, 62. 3 Perry Miller, “Thoreau in the Context of International Romanticism”, New England Quarterly, 34 (June 1961), 148. 4 Thoreau, The Essays, 125. 2

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become a walker, not a traveler, and so, unlike Emerson, never crossed the Atlantic to make the voyage back from New to Old England. Yet, if London itself was of no interest, there was someone in London who spurred his mind to such an extent that he became the subject of the only critical study Thoreau would ever write. The essay “Thomas Carlyle and His Works” was written in 1845, while Thoreau was living at Walden Pond. He was already working on his future masterpiece Walden; or, Life in the Woods, and for some time the same creative impulse nourished the essay on Carlyle. Both texts show Thoreau’s progression towards an authentic literary voice, but they share another essential feature: both are dominated by the idea of the importance of the genius loci. “the spirit of the place”. Precisely along the lines of this dominant idea the New England Transcendentalist Thoreau would evaluate his British subject – Carlyle. Although he never actually mentions Walden Pond in the essay, it is obvious that the lake constituted for Thoreau a particular viewpoint in reading Carlyle and his works. At the time of writing, Thoreau was entirely absorbed in his experiment, the experiment which would acquire such extraordinary fame in the course of American history. Walden Pond was for him the place of a truthful life in nature; that was why the pond became the emblem of a lived philosophy of life: it represented Thoreau’s Transcendentalist choice, which made possible the blending of Life and Art; it represented the vantage point, from the very bosom of nature, of Thoreau’s gaze. Hence, Thoreau living by Walden (or even elsewhere later) could be nothing but a Waldener. And in the eyes of this Waldener, Thomas Carlyle could appear as nothing other than a Londoner. Thoreau left his native Concord in order to conduct an experiment with his own life. Realizing that a change of place was necessary to accomplish his goal, he chose the concentration of mind Nature unfailingly provided over the dispersal of attention the city seemed to require. The place was of utmost importance for Thoreau – only Nature could become the place of a truthful life. Unsurprisingly, then, the idea of a place (of life) formed a permanent component in Thoreau’s thinking and the title of his spiritual autobiography naturally took the name of the place which made it possible – Walden. With such a notion in mind, Carlyle no doubt appeared above all as a Londoner and the choice of place emerged as the singular basis for

The Vision of the New England Transcendentalist: Thoreau 119 Thoreau’s dissatisfaction with him. The Scotsman Carlyle had chosen London, and Thoreau considered this choice in light of his own decision to live at Walden. So the fact that “Thomas Carlyle and His Works” was written at Walden, during his attempt to lead a truthful life in nature, determined Thoreau’s interest in the “genius of the place”, an interest to become a permanent preoccupation, framing, at the same time, the particular viewpoint on the subject of the essay. This viewpoint is manifested as numerous comparisons in the terms of place or the attitude towards place, establishing a topographic divide between two otherwise quite similar Transcendentalist mindsets. “As we read his books here in New England”, Thoreau writes, “where there are potatoes enough, and every man can get his living peacefully and sportively as the birds and bees, and need think no more of that, it seems to us as if by the world he often meant London, at the head of the tide upon the Thames, the sorest place on the face of the earth, the very citadel of conservatism”.5 This passage acts both as a comparison and a commentary, leaving no doubt in the reader’s mind as to which place Thoreau preferred. Moreover, spatial fixity here is seen as spiritually limiting and Thoreau emphasizes that: He has spent the last quarter of his life in London. He especially is the literary man of those parts. You may imagine him living in altogether a retired and simple way, with small family, in a quiet part of London, called Chelsea, a little out of the din of commerce, in “Cheyne Row”.... Here [in the front chamber, which is the spacious workshop of the world maker] he sits a long time together, with many books and papers about him.6

Sitting in his cabin at Walden Pond, in the very bosom of Nature, Thoreau is contemplating the figure of Carlyle, gradually narrowing the focus from the description of the city to a particular part of the city, from the part of the city to the street and finally to the “workshop”; the eyepiece gradually fixes on the physical space of Carlyle’s spacious study, only to remark immediately that even this “space” is walled in by “brick and pavement” – for in Thoreau’s mind that is the only thing Carlyle’s windows could look on to. The brief walks of a mile or two outside the city, Thoreau continues, could 5

Thoreau, “Thomas Carlyle and His Works”, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, I, 1610. 6 Ibid., 1594-95.

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never take Carlyle “to very sylvan or rustic places”, 7 so even the typically Romantic yearning for wild forests proves to be physically impossible to satisfy for the Londoner Carlyle. Thoreau examines not only physical space, but Transcendental space too in the terms of the limitations imposed on Carlyle’s Transcendental horizon by the closed-in physical environment. Thoreau considered Carlyle “thoroughly English in his love of practical men and dislike for cant, and ardent enthusiastic heads that are not supported by any legs”. 8 Carlyle was too earthbound for Thoreau, which does not imply that the author of Walden had an inherent inclination towards mysticism, nor that American Transcendentalism as a whole was detached from practical concerns. On the contrary even, as mentioned earlier, all New England Transcendentalists more or less carried within them the practical spirit of their forefathers, and however different from one another, they all put words to deeds. (Such, by the way, was not the case of most of their British counterparts, including Carlyle.) What bothered Thoreau was Carlyle’s devotion to history and its heroes, and his utter indifference to poetry and poets. And London here takes again the front stage: Carlyle in London ... sees no occasion for minstrels and rhapsodists .... He lives in Chelsea, not on the plains of Hindostan, nor on the prairies of the West, where settlers are scarce, and a man must at least go whistling to himself.9

The distinction between East (Europe) and West, between closed, both physically and spiritually, and open space, is more than clear. And Thoreau in fact could never treat physical space as separate from its spiritual dimensions. Space conceived as a spiritual category for Thoreau, as for the Transcendentalists in general, was synonymous with poetry. It was often associated with the gaze, the true Transcendentalist gaze being that of the poet: Emerson’s Poet-Priest is a Seer. Thoreau did not simply share Emerson’s notion of the unique vision of the poet, able to see beyond the visible; he applied it in deed, in his attempt to live as 7

Thoreau, “Thomas Carlyle and His Works”, 1595. Ibid., 1598. 9 Ibid., 1608. 8

The Vision of the New England Transcendentalist: Thoreau 121 a poet and transform his life into a poem. That was why he naturally concluded that “Carlyle is not a seer, but a brave looker-on and reviewer”. 10 Thoreau was certainly disappointed that Carlyle never wrote a single word on poetry, as he thought, and, in reality, rejected poets. But it seems that the main problem was Carlyle’s failure to become the Poet he had the potential to be – for, according to Thoreau, “Carlyle indicates a depth ... which he neglects to fathom”.11 The American Transcendentalist Thoreau believed that the British (Romantic) Carlyle should have opened his gaze to its full extent, until it became the all-encompassing vision of the poet. “To do himself justice, and set some of his readers right”, Thoreau adds, “[Carlyle] should give us some transcendent hero at length, to rule his demigods and Titans; develop, perhaps, his reserved and dumb reverence for Christ, not speaking to a London or Church of England audience merely”. Evidently Thoreau thinks that to create a “transcendental hero” in London is self-contradictory. If Carlyle were to meet such an expectation, he would have to free himself from the genius loci of London. Along with the brick facades and the pavement, his audience is presented as one more obstacle erected by the city itself, impeding the full expansion of Carlyle’s unquestionable talent. And Thoreau, driven by the essay’s main impulse, reaches this conclusion: “Possibly ... in the silence of the wilderness and the desert, he might have addressed himself more entirely to his true audience posterity.” 12 Thus, the central opposition in Thoreau’s evaluation of Carlyle hinges on the possibility of acquiring the poet’s gaze, a possibility annihilated by London but present abundantly in the wilderness of Nature. As mentioned earlier, “Thomas Carlyle and His Works” registered the development of a unique literary voice in Thoreau. Inspired by Carlyle’s stylistic breadth, Thoreau arrived at that mastery in weaving linguistic levels and sentences of varying length which became the hallmark of Walden. Carlyle’s style was not only a challenge and an impetus for Thoreau, but also a source of aesthetic enchantment – however critical of him in other respects, Thoreau practically worshipped Carlyle for his style. It is worth noticing, however, that Thoreau’s admiration, in its own way, illustrates the dichotomy 10

Ibid., 1609. Ibid., 1614. 12 Ibid., 1611. 11

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traversing the entire essay: Indeed, for fluency and skill in the use of the English tongue, he is a master unrivaled. His felicity and power of expression surpass even any of his special merits as a historian and critic. Therein his experience has not failed him, but furnished him with such a store of winged, aye, and legged words, as only a London life, perchance, could give account of; we had not understood the wealth of the language before.13

A higher praise could hardly be imagined. It is, moreover, delivered in a style which tries to emulate the style of its subject. But here again, as if driven by some unknown inner mechanism, Thoreau cannot help mentioning London, this time in a positive light, even if the words claim no more than that Carlyle’s stylistic prowess may be accounted for by “London life”. Yet, when it comes to actually praising the beauty of Carlyle’s writing, in Thoreau’s eyes, London is no longer a fit point of reference: Such a style – so diversified and variegated! It is like the face of a country; it is like a New England landscape, with farm-houses and villages, and cultivated spots, and belts of forests and blueberryswamps round about it, with the fragrance of shad-blossoms and violets on certain winds.14

This passage reveals at least two things: first, that in writing his essay on Carlyle, Thoreau became one of America’s greatest masters of style; and second, that when speaking about beauty, Thoreau’s comparisons are drawn exclusively from the natural world. Moreover, Nature for him is never nature in general, but that of America, New England nature. Thoreau wrote “Thomas Carlyle and His Works” while living in the forest – at a time when the change of living place represented for him a matter of existential proportions. “The Man of Concord”, as he was commonly referred to, chose to become (and remained) a Waldener; hence his particular vantage point in reading Carlyle, an author living and writing in London; hence also his particular view of London, as the place where Carlyle was living and writing. 13 14

Thoreau, The Norton Anthology, 1598. Ibid., 1600.

The Vision of the New England Transcendentalist: Thoreau 123 The essay thus reveals another very important thing: it singles out the differences between the New World and the Old World, assigning advantages to the former, and, respectively, drawbacks to the latter. (This trend Thoreau would develop in greater depth in his later works, bringing it to its zenith in the essay “Walking”, revised in its present form in the year of his death.) Any similarities, if at all mentioned, seem of no interest. Yet, such similarities existed beyond doubt, even if by the mere fact that Thoreau would not have written on something he considered too remote from, or foreign to, his own disposition. In this sense, choosing Carlyle as the subject of his essay is indicative; he did not write on any other of the British Romantics. It therefore appears difficult to accept the claim that only Carlyle’s style met with Thoreau’s admiration and provoked a desire in him to achieve similar stylistic mastery. There was certainly more to it, otherwise Thoreau would not have reproached Carlyle for failing to embrace the “depth” he believed he possessed. The essay “Thomas Carlyle and His Works” suggests a strong, although not sufficiently explicit, inner connection between the American and the British authors. No doubt, “when we turn to the English romantics, we find surprisingly little explicit comment in Thoreau’s writings”,15 the essay on Carlyle being the only such, quite elaborate, comment. But above all, in writing at length on Carlyle’s German influences and his role in disseminating German Transcendental thought in Great Britain, Thoreau clearly shows that he shared Carlyle’s philosophical interests and was himself subject to the same influences. It is important to emphasize here that Thoreau alone among his New England co-thinkers readily called himself “a transcendentalist”. It is also a fact that, although having a relatively good command of the German language, Thoreau encountered post-Kantian thought and felt its influence through the mediation of Wordsworth’s, Coleridge’s, and, most of all, Carlyle’s translations and essays. (Not forgetting, however, that there was yet another step of removal, as Emerson was the first to introduce British post-Kantian thought in New England.) As early as his college years at Harvard, Thoreau must have sensed the distant waft of Transcendentalist ideas, which he would subsequently interiorize, placing them at the very heart of his own 15

Norman Foerster, “The Intellectual Heritage of Thoreau”, Texas Review, II, February 1917, 200 (quoted in Harding, A Thoreau Handbook, 107).

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perception of self. In this process, Carlyle’s role is important. If “Coleridge was of interest to Thoreau not as a poet but as the translator and exponent of the German Transcendentalists”,16 Carlyle obviously excited a different kind of interest. Thoreau’s overflowing admiration, his awe for Carlyle’s style, constituted, in fact, his reverence towards the poet Carlyle. This would explain his dissatisfaction with the insufficiency of depth in Carlyle’s otherwise extraordinary stylistic breadth: such style, according to Thoreau, could reveal the profundity of Transcendental truth – and then, and only then, it could become poetry. So Thoreau felt disappointment with Carlyle not simply because he thought Carlyle had never written a word on poetry and seemed to ignore poets altogether, but above all because he had only partially manifested the poet that he, in reality, was. In fact, Thoreau read Carlyle from the point of view of a poet – a New England Transcendentalist poet, a Poet-Priest – and saw in him another poet who had never fully expanded his potential. His dissatisfaction was great; it was proportionate to the admiration he felt for that which Carlyle was able fully to accomplish – the style of the poet Carlyle, but it combined, at the same time, with the feeling that a spiritual closeness, although possible, had not been given a chance to burgeon. Thoreau probably had no such feeling with regard to either Wordsworth, who, he believed, “had genius but lacked talent”,17 or Coleridge, despite his avid reading of Aids to Reflection. Evidently, Carlyle’s mastery of style played a central role in unveiling the gaze of Thoreau, the Romantic poet, so the mere fact that both were influenced by German Transcendental thought was not enough for Thoreau (while it was most probably enough as far as Coleridge was concerned). It was Carlyle’s perfection of style which provoked in Thoreau the Transcendentalist and Romantic need to create a correspondence between linguistic intricacy and spiritual breadth, between thought and expression, imposing already the metaphor (the transcendental dimension of language) as the main trope in his own style. It also inspired the need – already a self-chosen destiny for Thoreau at the time of writing the essay on Carlyle at Walden Pond – to bring poetry and life into one. Thoreau, therefore, does not read Carlyle from the distanced point of view of a literary critic or a scholar, but from the deeply personal 16 17

Harding, A Thoreau Handbook, 107. Thoreau, The Journal, I, 431.

The Vision of the New England Transcendentalist: Thoreau 125 point of view of a Transcendentalist poet. That is why the essay assumes at times a didactic tone. The New England Poet-Priest preaches to his London fellow-writer, urging him to let his spirit soar as high as the beauty of his style. In fact, Thoreau recommends to Carlyle no less than an inner, personal reformation. For he was convinced that among his British contemporaries only Carlyle had the potential to attain that poetic gaze capable of perceiving the visibility beyond the visible. And here again the conception of place, as the vivid line of demarcation running through the whole essay, comes to the fore: the personal reformation Thoreau suggests is completely dependent on the genius loci. Only by leaving London, this “citadel of conservatism”, this “sorest place on the face of the earth”, and by choosing “the silence of the wilderness”, would Carlyle be able to create a “transcendental hero”, attain Transcendental truth and unveil his gaze, or become a true poet. Carlyle was too “English” in Thoreau’s view, not only because Thoreau shared the typical Transcendental and Romantic dislike for all rationalism and pragmatism, but because, as many scholars have pointed out, “the tormenting desire of European, especially Continental Romanticism – the sighs, the aching void, the meltings ... were more remote from his experience than the moral integrity of the Puritans and the serene reason of the Greeks”. 18 Thoreau does not simply read Carlyle, the London writer, from the vantage point of Walden, in the belief that “the spirit of the place” is of utmost importance; he actually sees himself as the voice of the place, as its personification. And “place” here means more than Walden Pond, more than Massachusetts or New England – “the place” means America. Precisely as an inhabitant of the New World, as an American, Thoreau judges Carlyle, accounting for what he believed to be Carlyle’s spiritual deficiency by his being British. By the same token, years later, he would see the world’s future in the West, and the West as Wildness, as America. It is this same mindset which later informed Walt Whitman’s exalted hymns to America, with her “leaves of grass” encapsulating the whole universe. And it is the same set of ideas which Emerson propounded through the figure of his “American Scholar”, the PoetPriest of the New World. At the basis of this worldview stands the 18

Norman Foerster, Nature in American Literature, New York: Macmillan, 1923, 128.

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dream of America as the Promised Land, the New Jerusalem – that old European dream of America, romantically transfigured by the American Transcendentalists to embody poetry’s very essence, or the poet’s true calling, proudly representing what it means to be American. This radical enthusiasm, this powerful influx of feelings, combining breadth of thought with the exhilaration of the old dream of America, largely determined how the New England Transcendentalists saw their British co-thinkers, the Romantics. As James McIntosh rightly observes: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe all feel their connections with the European past frayed and severed. All are isolatoes who must construct imaginative lives for themselves. Thoreau chose to fashion his life in nature; as for many Americans, this was the legitimate and evident ground of the imagination, on which castles-in-air might be built with solid foundations.19

Thoreau at Walden, young, strong, full of energy, surrounded by a wilderness bursting with vitality, and Carlyle in his London study, older, tired, surrounded by piles of dust-covered papers – these were two “representative men”, to borrow Carlyle’s own term. The antinomy of the Romantic-Transcendentalist consciousness is here visible in its extreme. II It is crucial to point out that the essay on Carlyle was written during a period characterized by the most fulfilling sense of unity with nature for Thoreau, when he felt “a part of herself”, as he notes in Walden.20 This is the period during which he was embodying, in his real life, Emerson’s idea of the correspondence between nature and the human mind – the idea that nature and consciousness are identical structures and that nature constitutes an immense treasure-house of metaphors of human relationships and actions. Thus, from the perspective of his identification with “the spirit of the place”, Thoreau’s judgment on Carlyle was unwavering. There is none of the painfulness, the sense of alienation, however restrained, which later would turn into a real 19 20

McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist, 49-50. Thoreau, Walden, 97.

The Vision of the New England Transcendentalist: Thoreau 127 existential challenge for Thoreau. It is not until several years afterwards that such a feeling finds its way into his Journal: We soon get through with Nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy. The merest child which has rambled into a copsewood dreams of a wilderness so wild and strange and inexhaustible as Nature can never show him.21

His essay “Walking”, revised for the last time in 1862, the year of his death, suggests that the tormenting sentiment of alienation might have become profound by that time. In fact, the more torment Thoreau felt in his nostalgia for the lost unity with nature, the more he exalted in nature’s unbridled vitality. The reason for this does not lie merely in a Romantic taste for contradiction, but implies a struggle for self-preservation, the compensatory mechanism of a “self” which, having lost its inner harmony, yearned for that sublime state of perfect wholeness experienced at Walden, when writing the essay on Carlyle. Back then, Thoreau had felt no inner torment and doubt. Nature was truly the great metaphor for his own life and chosen destiny, for his entirely harmonious view on the world, and he himself was nature’s voice. The sense of wholeness for Thoreau made salient the divergences with his British contemporaries. The essay on Carlyle testifies to this. But when the state of wholeness was fissured, when the sense of unity with nature began to lose its power and was gradually overcome by nostalgia for what was lost, Thoreau came closer to his fellow writers from the Old World. (The awareness of this greater proximity, by the way, could not have been a source of joy.) As James McIntosh duly points out: Thoreau and his European counterparts are romantics ... partly because they share a more or less open awareness of their separation from nature, however much they may desire to be at home in it. This awareness is of a piece with their awareness of themselves as isolated and self-conscious imaginative men, as unacknowledged prophets of a new society calling in a new language to the city from their personal exiles in the grove, the poetic commune, or the wilderness …. The

21

Thoreau, The Journal, VI, 293.

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The fear of losing touch with nature is typically Romantic, as is the inner torment when that loss becomes a fact. Communion with nature itself does not come naturally; the Romantic poet makes a choice to see nature as unified with man or as separated from him. Thus, the poet’s attitude to nature is a matter of will – it is a conscious state of watchfulness. In all of his writings, Thoreau constantly called for wakefulness. Sleep is to be overcome, and sight kept on the alert. This is the call of the Poet-Priest, singing, in Thoreau’s own words in Walden, “as lustily as chanticleer in the morning”, trying to raise his fellowmen from their sleep. This is the Transcendentalist call for willed inner concentration whose goal is the attainment of visibility beyond the visible. But Thoreau’s appeal is also, in a very personal manner, directed inwards, towards himself, and it belies the foreboding of future disunity with nature. It affirms the necessity of a constant sharpening of the senses, while revealing the smoldering doubt that such a state can never remain permanent. At Walden, Thoreau was above all the prophet, strong and steady in his oneness with nature, in whose words barely transpired only the slightest misgiving; later in his Journal and in his late essays, the sense of foreboding is replaced by a conscious resistance to what is already a fact – the “combination”, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge would characterize the efforts of the Self to regain harmony with the Non-Self, had broken. “We are all One Life”, Coleridge wrote in 1802 in a letter to William Sotheby: “A poet’s heart and intellect should be combined, intimately combined and unified with the great appearances of nature.”23 Having accepted such Romantic views, and moreover, having pushed them to the extreme in choosing to blend art and life, Thoreau must have found selfcontemplation – after the loss of harmony – to be quite a bitter experience. His journal of 1851 is quite telling here: Formerly, methought, nature developed as I developed, and grew up with me. My life was ecstasy. In youth, before I lost any of my senses, 22

McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist, 50. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956, II, 459. 23

The Vision of the New England Transcendentalist: Thoreau 129 I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction; both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet to me. This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains. For years I marched as to a music in comparison with which the military music of the streets is noise and discord. I was daily intoxicated, and yet no man could call me intemperate. With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?24

Thoreau’s question can also be posed in the following way: with all your science can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes no more into the soul? The quoted passage from the Journal, with the captivating beauty of its metaphors, is revelatory in a number of ways. It is built around a multiplicity of oppositions: Thoreau vividly contrasts the sharpness of perception and the loss of the senses, unending ecstasy and the lack of intoxication, unity and disunity with earth’s music, bursting vitality and weariness, youth and old age, past and present. It has been remarked already that of a particularly strong influence on Thoreau was Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”, which centers on the nostalgiadriven return to the poet’s youth, on the memory of an unwavering faith in nature, an unwavering gaze, the memory of which is conjured in order to help the poet against the increasingly frequent invasions of doubt. It has also been pointed out that, although very influenced by Wordsworth in his reverence towards the remembrance of childhood and early youth, Thoreau, unlike Wordsworth, envisioned “his remembered paradise [as] a natural place inhabited by the senses, [and] not a glorious, distant place”; Thoreau’s nature is “less general and visionary than Wordsworth’s, more earthy and obviously erotic”.25 The reason for this difference lies in the fact that Thoreau lived his ideas, blurring all boundaries between abstract notions and real, personal life (or at least, attempted to do so throughout his life). He was, moreover, an inhabitant of the New World, a “New Adam”,26 who had severed his connections with Europe’s past and now lived in 24

Thoreau, The Journal, II, 306-307. McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist, 61-63. 26 R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. 25

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heaven on earth, an heir to New England’s great forefathers, who set foot on the American coast to stay there forever and build their new life in harmony with its nature, not in enmity or alienation from it. Precisely this sense of belonging to New England’s tradition is the key to understanding Thoreau and his late nostalgia-filled, vacillating states of mind, because it is this sense of belonging which nourishes the intoxication of remembering the youthful oneness with the essence, with the genius loci of Walden, or of the Maine Woods, of New England, of America; it is this sense which rubs salt in the wound, left by the loss of the Transcendentalist perception of wholeness, and, in an attempt to compensate, engenders the radical exaltation before the Wildness, perceiving that Wildness in fundamental opposition to the East or the Old World (“Walking”). The desire, characteristic of all Romantic nature poets, to attain a balance between mind and nature through the imagination is even more strongly felt in Thoreau for two main reasons. He was deeply susceptible to the influence of those of the English Romantics whom he felt close to his own inner disposition, but he was no less deeply connected to the Puritan tradition of the pilgrims, which insisted on a mode of existence in harmony with New England’s nature. Therefore, the sense, still typical for all Romantics, that this balance may be threatened, or actually broken, as he felt in later years, was for Thoreau intensified by the sentiment that the New World had lost its advantages and that he had betrayed the “spirit of the place” whose voice he had once been. Thus, to feel in any way closer in his state of mind to the European (or British) Romantics amounted to losing the connection with his New England roots, and these were extremely important for him – they were at the source of his very existence. While feeling one with the woods at Walden, it was easier to be different from his great contemporaries across the Atlantic – this was the case in the essay on Carlyle; but it was much more difficult to preserve his difference once the feeling of unity had started to wither away. In both cases, nevertheless, the plane of reference remained the same – New England nature. Thus, experimenting with self-forgetting was possible only at Walden. Only there could Thoreau submerge his self into such oblivion, dissolve it in the abundance of nature to the point of becoming “as wise as the day I was born”. 27 And when, later, like 27

Thoreau, Walden, 73.

The Vision of the New England Transcendentalist: Thoreau 131 Wordsworth, Thoreau yearned for the past, for his youth, the memory was more vivid, more alive and concrete, definitely more personal and earthy, above all because it was inherently associated with the nature of New England. Whereas in his dream of childhood Wordsworth longs for some distant landscape, belonging, as if, to another world, where “meadow, grove and stream” are “apparelled in celestial light”,28 Thoreau dreams of no otherworldliness – everything revolves around one axis of contrast, before and after “I lost any of my senses”. “Ah, those youthful days!” Thoreau exclaims elsewhere in his Journal: Are they never to return? When the walker does not too curiously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself, – the phenomena that show themselves in him, – his expanding body, his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or bird, confined his view, but the unbounded universe was his. A bird is now become a mote in his eye.29

The things remembered here are concrete, the longing for them has not been cooled by the idealizing distance of time, and the pain from losing the state of wholeness is felt almost physically. The passage’s underlying motive lies in Thoreau’s growing inability to experience moments of transcendental illumination and maintain that blending of Life and Art of which he was capable in his childhood and youth. In such a state of mind, Thoreau would not mention either Coleridge or Wordsworth, let alone begin to write on Carlyle and his works. On the contrary, this state of mind appears to him so “Eastern”, or European, that he avoids any possible concurrence with the dangerous prototype, abandoning himself, instead, to the exalted praise of the Wild, of “the West”, of America. Thoreau’s nostalgia for “the light [that] comes into the soul” circumvents, and ultimately overcomes, Wordsworth’s longing for the landscape-remembrance “apparelled in celestial light”, and transforms itself, in the essay “Walking”, into a hymn to the state of wholeness attainable for him only in the embrace of America’s wild nature: “Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such 28

William Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”, in William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, London: Oxford University Press, 1959, 328. 29 Thoreau, The Journal, V, 75.

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beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man to man, – a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”30 The rich texture of meaning in the passage is partly provided by the same characteristic opposition between East and West which underlies Thoreau’s essay on Carlyle. But here the contrast does not issue from a feeling of inner stability; its moving cause is, rather, an instinct of self-preservation (hence its radicalism). Thoreau is grasping at his native roots in order to fend against the dreadful possibility, more present than ever, that the “Eastern” Romantics could impede the manifestations of his “Western” New England authenticity. Moreover, like many other Romantics, Thoreau exhibits an inclination which Geoffrey Hartman has aptly named “apocalyptic” – the inclination “to cast out nature and achieve an unmediated contact with the principle of things”. 31 This idealist impulse in some ways counteracts the Romantic love for nature with its yearning for dissolving communion. Thus, Wordsworth, in a number of his late poems, which Thoreau, in fact, read with great enthusiasm, leaves the impression of an unquenched apocalyptic nostalgia for some preconscious, a priori splendor, in the attainment of which nature is not to be lovingly embraced, but overcome and surpassed. The apocalyptic longing for a contact with the very essence of things leads Thoreau either, in the rarer cases, to a desire “to get through with Nature” (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers), or, paradoxically and more often, to apocalyptic visions within nature itself: “Like Wordsworth and other romantics who come from a tradition of radical Protestant feeling, he [Thoreau] harbors deep within a hope for a millennium, an apocalypse that transforms society and ends history; and when he pictures such a total renewal he sees it distinctly on the actual soil of New England.”32 The lovely description of a November sunset at the end of “Walking” unambiguously suggests the idea of paradise regained: The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with 30

Thoreau, The Essays, 137. Hartman, The Unmediated Vision, 9-10. 32 McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist, 67. 31

The Vision of the New England Transcendentalist: Thoreau 133 all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before, – where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening. So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.33

In this same essay, Thoreau glorifies the West as the Wild, and the Wild as the very source of life, as “the future” of the world, the paradise to which, reborn, we will awaken. And the “great awakening light” of this heaven far from distant and cold is but gleaming warm and cozy, “as on a bankside in autumn”, as on the banks of Walden, as in Massachusetts …. And, as in all moments of revelation in Thoreau, the bright vision blends with the scenery of New England. Partly what holds the two together is the apocalyptic vision, the idea of “a millennium”. Moreover, Thoreau is here a mature man, who has lost to some extent the sharp sensibility of his youth, but strives to feel, see, hear, scent, taste again, a man longing for his youth, but walking towards the splendid image of the Holy Land solely (as has always been the case) for his own, profoundly personal reasons. The magnificent evangelical revelation also attracts him with its immensity, which, by its sheer magnitude, can stimulate his waning Transcendentalist gaze and quicken his senses – again, as is always the case, to the beauty of his native land. Here the comparison with any significant, transatlantic Romantic prototypes is less than likely. In his nostalgia-driven struggle to regain inner harmony, Thoreau in these apocalyptic visions revives the great old dream, cherished by Christianity, of America as “the new land and new sky”, seen as possible at long last in the New 33

Thoreau, The Essays, 142-43.

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World; he revives the first pilgrims’ sublime faith in their calling to create the New Jerusalem. The sublimity of this faith suits the late Thoreau, because it elevates him and protects him at the same time. Nature’s Wildness and the high spiritual tradition of the Atlantic’s West Coast represent for Thoreau, in his doubt-ridden state of mind, the only solid leverage. So Saint John’s revelation takes on the features of New England’s landscape. And any parallel which his inner torment may evoke with the British Romantics is avoided as rather dangerous. Thoreau would not allow his British counterparts to prevent him from being an authentic New Englander – neither in his youth, nor, even less so, in his mature years.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE ENCHANTMENT OF THE VOYAGE BACK: MARGARET FULLER She stays out in New England as an exotic, like a foreigner from some more sultry and expansive climate .... She is our citizen of the world by quite special diploma.1

I Highly erudite, exceptionally intelligent, Margaret Fuller quickly became known in New England’s cultural milieu of the 1840s not only as a very educated woman for her time but also as an ardent proponent of European literatures in America. Her sharpness of observation and vibrant temperament placed her among the most radical of the Transcendentalists, all of whom highly praised her, although invariably perceiving her as somewhat different. Emerson was definitely not the only one to characterize Margaret Fuller as “a foreigner”. “She is a German, heart and soul”, Orestes Brownson firmly pronounced his judgment, and although he could not deny her “flashes of rare genius”, he remained critical and kept his distance.2 Fuller’s first-class, “male” education was combined with a lack of feminine gentleness; her talent as an orator, writer and critic exhibited unfeminine coolness, all of which undoubtedly made it difficult to accept her within the Transcendentalist all-male circle, so, in her elitist New England milieu, she was put on the pedestal of “exoticism”. Emerson wrote about her in his memoirs: Our moods were very different and I remember, that, at the very time 1

Emerson to Carlyle, 1846, in The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, 407408. 2 Quoted in Mason Wade, Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius, New York: The Viking Press, 1940, 126.

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Emerson obviously valued her selectively: he had a genuine and intense respect for her intellect and culture, but his positive judgment stopped there. Everything else was put aside as “other” – foreign both to himself and his perception of New England. Indeed, despite the admiration she inspired, the very nature of Margaret Fuller’s intellectualism seemed distant to Emerson and the Transcendentalists in his Concord circle, not so much because it came in a female shape, but above all because its forceful movements had their springs in faraway, transatlantic lands – something Margaret Fuller was far from attempting to hide. She never perceived the powerful influence of European literatures as a threat to her New England identity, so she did not feel, and perhaps did not understand, Emerson’s and Thoreau’s acute need to fight the danger of contagious ideas from across the Atlantic in order to preserve their authenticity as New Englanders. At the time when her native New England, with exalting devotion, was writing its cultural declaration of independence, trying to sever its ties with Europe and build a national, properly American, cultural identity, Fuller fearlessly, purposefully and without any inner turmoil, was declaring her own borderless cultural identity, built once and for all on the basis of erudition. Thus, it is no surprise that her New England contemporaries continuously saw the source of her otherness in some kind of foreignness, in something that placed her outside America. Fuller was “an exotic”, “a foreigner” and even “a German”. When not out-andout negative, such qualifications nevertheless retain the cool respect for a distant and elevated figure. In the case of Emerson, the sympathy is there, as is the satisfaction in the level of their intellectual exchange, but there can be no question of spiritual and human intimacy. Orestes Brownson observes in his criticism of Margaret Fuller’s “foreignness”: 3

Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, eds Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, 2 vols, Boston: Phillips, Samson, 1852, I, 288.

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This high-priestess of American Transcendentalism has read much, but the materials she has connected lie fermenting in her intellectual stomach, and generate all manner of strange and diseased fancies .... She now reminds us of the old heathen Euripides, now of the modern skeptic Byron, and finally of the cold indifferentism of Goethe.

Clearly, for Brownson, Margaret Fuller had read too much – and too superficially – which, added to the fact of being a woman, prevented her from developing her own (and her national) identity, while also impeding her femininity from fully flourishing. In his eyes, Margaret Fuller did not have what it took to be either an “ornament of her sex, [or] a crown of blessings to her country”. 4 Horace Greeley was equally critical, but much more temperate and restrained in his judgment. “She wrote always freshly, vigorously, but not always clearly”, he commented on the same early period of Fuller’s career as a writer and literary critic, while pointing to the causes of her perceived fault: “her full and intimate acquaintance with continental literature, especially German, seemed to have marred her felicity and readiness of expression in her mother tongue.”5 There is undoubtedly some justification to Greeley’s observation, and it is all the more convincing because, unlike Brownson’s comments, it did not lead its author to a full rejection of Margaret Fuller as a person. On the contrary even, Greeley offered Fuller the pages of his daily newspaper, The New York Tribune, where her literary talent could finally shine in all its brilliance, acquiring the exposure and the public it merited. New York appreciated her cosmopolitanism and made it stand out. So, after the two years she spent there, Emerson, in his letter to Carlyle, could indeed “give back” to Europe the Margaret Fuller who was truly “a citizen of the world”. And as far as the criticism of Bostonians like Brownson, Fuller had already penned her own riposte: “I have been accused of undue attachment to foreign continental literature ... but what draws me to it is the range and force of ideal manifestations in forms of national and individual greatness.” 6 Emerson, perhaps more than any of his compatriots, could feel deep respect for such feelings. That is why he recommended Margaret 4

Quoted in Wade, Margaret Fuller, 126. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, II, 154-56. 6 Quoted in Wade, Margaret Fuller, 152. 5

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Fuller, with a sense of personal and national pride, to Thomas Carlyle – the man he indubitably considered to be the personification of “national and individual greatness” on the other side of the Atlantic. Several months after taking her letter of recommendation to London, Margaret Fuller would write to Emerson from Rome: I find how true was the lure that always drew me towards Europe. It was no false instinct that said I might here find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need. Had I only come ten years earlier! Now my life must be a failure, so much strength has been wasted on abstractions, which only came because I grew not in the right soil. However, it is a less failure than with most others, and not worth thinking twice about. Heaven has room enough, and good chances in store, and I can live a great deal in the years that remain.7

But the years that remained proved to be only two: in the summer of 1850, merely forty years old, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, the sworn European in temperament and now in social status as well, perished in a shipwreck by the coast of New Jersey, together with her husband, the Italian count Ossoli, and their infant son. Her many unfinished manuscripts, along with her extensive work on the Italian revolution, disappeared forever in the abysmal depths of the ocean. There seems to be something symbolic in the fact that Margaret Fuller never reached the coasts of her native America, as if her actual destiny repeated the one-way journey to Europe her spirit had long ago accomplished. Her life before moving to Europe, however, was far from being a failure – and she certainly knew it, yet, captivated by these long-cherished European vistas, consciously exaggerated her sentiment in the letter to Emerson. Brilliant and “exotic”, first in Boston and then in New York, for more than a decade Margaret Fuller had been devoted, with her sharp mind and erudition, to the shaping of Americans’ literary tastes. Both as the editor in chief of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial and as the literary editor of the New York Daily Tribune, she aimed at keeping her fellow countrymen’s sight clear and alert to the merits of European literatures. Thus, while preparing for publication her volume Papers on Literature and Art (1846), only a few months before sailing to 7

Margaret Fuller, The Letters of Margaret Fuller, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth, 6 vols, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1983-94, IV, 314.

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Europe, she showed visible pride and satisfaction with the work done, noting in her Preface: It has been one great object of my life to introduce here the works of those great geniuses, the flower and fruit of a higher state of development, which might give the young, who are soon to constitute the state, a higher standard in thought and action than would be demanded of them by their own time .... I feel with satisfaction that I have done a good deal to extend the influence of the great minds of Germany and Italy among my contemporaries.8

II The great task Margaret Fuller undertook as a cultural figure in her particularly active and fruitful years in Boston and New York stemmed from the clear awareness that the cultural standards of her native America needed to be raised – and that awareness originated in the contradictory feelings of extreme discontent and extreme enthusiasm. Margaret Fuller was indeed among the most radical Transcendentalists, and her absolute devotion to contemporary European literatures made her subject to the oscillating states of mind and radical dispositions of late European Romanticism. All of this, however, in no way belied a national inferiority complex; on the contrary, just as Emerson, Fuller was convinced that “a genius wide and full as our rivers, flowery, luxuriant and impassionate as our vast prairies, rooted in strength as the rocks on which the Puritan fathers landed will rise up in America”. Unlike Emerson, though, Margaret Fuller never announced, neither did she believe, that America’s “long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands” was over. She did not see such an apprenticeship as the proof of cultural dependency which it represented for Emerson and Thoreau, so she insisted, with conviction, that the European thinkers and poets were “useful schoolmasters to our people in a transition state”. Instead of pleading for the detachment of her country into a cultural entity free from its connections to Europe, and extolling the extraordinary potential in America’s eventual “self-reliance”, Margaret Fuller cherished the idea that the still young United States could join in and share the high 8

Quoted in Wade, Margaret Fuller, 150-51.

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standards and values of a world culture. In fact, to Margaret Filler’s mind, the question of America’s cultural identity did not involve any reference to the country’s dependence on – or, respectively, independence from – Europe. Strongly influenced in her youth by Emerson’s idea of “correspondences”, Fuller saw beyond the visible in America’s situation at the time, catching the glimpse, the distant flicker of an America which could be an inseparable part, equal in merit, “in correspondence” with the highest cultural achievements of the world. “Scarce the first faint streaks of that day’s dawn are yet visible”,9 she wrote. But “that day” would come sooner, if America’s cultural horizons extended the furthest and highest possible – such was Fuller’s perception of her own mission. This mission, however, did not transform her into the bearer of any one particular culture. Whether she wrote on American literature, on contemporary European literatures, or whether she commented on her own works, Margaret Fuller never assumed the position of an American, and even less so that of a European, despite the accusations of most of her fellow countrymen. In every line she wrote transpired the supra-national consciousness of a citizen of the world. Fuller was not interested in delimiting cultural differences in terms of categories such as “native” and “foreign”. Her extraordinary erudition and her professionalism as a literary critic allowed her to follow freely her interests and enthusiasms, while remaining loyal only to her idea of what constituted high literary value. Hence her ardent and insightful critical observations on a quite colorful but elect supra-national society of literary authors, in which a central place was given to Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Madame de Staël, George Sand and – above all – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. For Margaret Fuller the idea of “correspondences” transcended national boundaries, having become proper to that limitless domain where the only criterion of commensurability was literary greatness. Her thinking was moving along Goethe’s idea of a world literature. “A ... concept shared with Goethe is that of critic as mediating between cultures, aiding in establishing a world literature: not that nations shall think alike, but that they shall learn how to understand each other, and ... at least ... learn to tolerate one another”, Joel Myerson rightly observes. Accepting her role as a literary critic in Goethe’s sense of the term, 9

Margaret Fuller, “American Literature”, quoted in ibid., 152.

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Margaret Fuller clearly positioned herself as the American “world” critic. Fuller’s critical thinking was strongly influenced by Goethe’s work – from the very beginning of her career, when in 1836 she translated the conversations with Eckermann, until her very last reviews and articles. She owed to Goethe her absolute confidence in the value of an unprejudiced and strictly individualized reader (or critic) response.10 Her critical texts, for the most part drawn on her extensive reader’s journals, most often show the unmediated emotions and spiritual sympathy of her individual appreciation as a reader. “We cannot speak dispassionately of an influence that has been so dear to us”, she notes in her “Review of the Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”: Nearer than the nearest companions of life actual has Shelley been to us. Many other great ones have shone upon us …. But Shelley seemed to us an incarnation of what was sought in the sympathies and desires of instinctive life, a light of dawn, and a foreshadowing of the weather of this day.11

This commentary on Shelley reflects Fuller’s universal critical approach – universal in as much as it is applied, without exception, to all world authors in the spectrum of her critical and literary affiliations. In every text Margaret Fuller ever penned, she underlined, vividly and unambiguously, the presence of her own personality. Her extraordinary erudition and brilliant mind could only make this stylistic tendency towards emphatic self-exposure more intense. Yet she never assumed a didactic tone: Fuller was a strong opponent of any moral teaching and any expression of authoritative opinion, above all in literary works, but no less in literary criticism. (The very act of choosing the authors to comment upon – a choice determined necessarily by high criteria – represented for her a sufficiently clear and explicit critical position.) Indeed, Fuller censured Thomas Carlyle precisely for his excessive moralizing. “Unlike Mr. Carlyle, we are willing to let each reader judge for himself”, she deliberately notes in 10

Joel Myerson, “Introduction”, in Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the NewYork Tribune, 1844-1846, eds Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, xxx. 11 Margaret Fuller, “Review of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, in ibid., 317-18.

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her review of Carlyle’s work on the letters and speeches of Cromwell.12 It is worth remarking that Margaret Fuller and Henry Thoreau directed their critical attention to the works of Thomas Carlyle about the same time (the year 1845). While acknowledging the greatness of his titanic thought and masterful style, both had reasons for being dissatisfied with their transatlantic contemporary, but their reasons were different. Awed by Carlyle’s mastery of style (from which, in fact, he learned much), Thoreau accused him of lack of breadth and of being unable to create a true “transcendental hero” – something Thoreau accounted for, as discussed earlier, by the bad choice of place. Carlyle lived in London whose brick walls fatefully limited his writerly gaze. For Margaret Fuller, by contrast, the genius loci was of no significance: even if Carlyle was writing from the limitless and free expanses of America, she would have reproached him for his tendency to moralize. Fuller would not have qualified his unilateral, authoritative judgments, which she so disapproved of, as “too English” – these were unacceptable as being simply Carlyle’s, and not attributable to the British in general; similarly, she rejected his approach on the basis of her own beliefs, which she did not necessarily identify as American, that is as being characteristically advantageous because born on American soil. Unlike Fuller, on the other hand, Thoreau seemed undisturbed by Carlyle’s moralist attitude; and unlike Thoreau, Fuller did not necessarily ascribe the lack of (Transcendentalist) openness to Carlyle’s “continental” origins. Being in New York was only a chance, but not a reason for Fuller to write on Carlyle. Indeed, she wrote on Carlyle without any interest in the fact that he was a Scotsman who had chosen to live in Chelsea by the river Thames. The demarcation between the Old World and the New World was not one of value to her – and, in fact, was not seen as any sort of divide. Her critical gaze continuously strove for, shaped and followed the outlines of a culturally all-encompassing wholeness. Margaret Fuller’s and Thoreau’s texts on Carlyle, in fact, provide the only opportunity of comparing the Transcendentalists’ approach to literary criticism. Thoreau’s essay, to the degree that it can be considered a piece of literary criticism given its much stronger 12

Margaret Fuller, “Review of Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches”, in ibid., 316.

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elements of autobiography, remains the only one of this kind that he wrote; neither Emerson, nor any of the other members of his Transcendentalist circle devoted enough of their attention to critical readings of other authors, be they American or European, to write anything more than remarks in personal journals or letters. Thus even from the point of view of genre, Margaret Fuller set herself somewhat apart from her New England milieu. In New York, however, she could find her kindred critical spirit, equal in merit and talent, in the face of Edgar Allan Poe. Thanks to their mutual respect and their equally professional attitude, the two formed the great American critical duo of the nineteenth century. Both believed that moralizing was a supreme fault in a literary work, and considered beauty to be the true domain of art. These more or less theoretically justified convictions were applied in practice in their literary criticism, but whereas Poe saw the value of a work of literature per se, for literature’s own sake, Margaret Fuller believed that a “book should be only an indication of [the author’s self]”, and maintained that “writing is worthless except as the record of life”.13 Despite the fact that this particular formulation of Fuller’s literary creed dates back to her Boston years in The Dial, it never lost its validity: her impressive critical output in The New York Daily Tribune can doubtlessly be seen as “the record of her life”, of her extraordinary and brilliant personality, everywhere declaring itself – although not through authoritative gestures, but in acts of authorial self-revelation, in exalted, unending “hymns to intellectual beauty” (to borrow the title of one of her favorite of Shelley’s poems). Precisely because of this centripetal tendency, which informed her every sentence and which validated entirely her occupations, Margaret Fuller could appear perfectly “non-exotic”, absolutely “self-reliant” in the Emersonian sense: with her profound trust in herself, she could posit her own person not only as the beginning of all beginnings, but also as the end of all she ever undertook to write (something unimaginable in the case of Poe). And yet, even if she manifested the good spiritual health of her New England contemporaries, Margaret Fuller’s emphatic and vivid subjectivity exhibited less the shades and tints of the Puritan Transcendentalist “representative self” than those of the extreme individualism of the late European Romanticism. The perception of her New England fellow countrymen in considering her “a foreigner” was not completely unjust. 13

Margaret Fuller, Life Without and Life Within, 26.

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But what exactly stood behind the impression of European character which this authentic New England woman produced in her native country? Or, rather, what stood behind her conviction that she was a citizen of the world? The initial cause can doubtlessly be located in her extraordinary familiarity with world literature: Margaret Fuller possessed a profound and detailed knowledge of American, English, German, French and Italian literature. What is more, she could read most of these literary works in their original language. Her free movement between cultures was predicated on her command of foreign languages, among which German occupied the first place (she mostly translated Goethe’s work): In no way can you better refine and liberalize taste and fancy than by the comparisons to which you will be led between the gifts of the English and the German muse. And the language itself, by its great pictorial power will refresh you.14

Fuller’s conclusion came from personal experience, and personal experience that few of her countrymen shared – of endless labor and sleepless nights, but also of unusual devotion to a vocation found early in life. To this personal sense of purpose, something very important must be added, of which Emerson took special notice in his memoirs of Margaret Fuller: I have heard that from the beginning of her life she idealized herself as a sovereign .... She early saw herself to be intellectually superior to those around her, and ... for years she dwelt upon the idea, until she believed that she was not her parents' child, but an European princess confined to their care. She remembered that, when a little girl, she was walking one day under the apple trees with such an air and step, that her father [Timothy] pointed her out to her sister [Ellen], saying ‘Incedit Regina’.

Further in his memoirs, Emerson quotes a letter to a friend in which Margaret Fuller confided, “I take my natural position always, and the more I see, the more I feel that it is regal. Without throne, scepter, or guards, still a queen!”15 Her self-perception as “a queen” – moreover openly admitted and articulated with due form – could indeed be 14 15

Margaret Fuller, “Study of the German Language”, in Margaret Fuller, Critic, 294. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, I, 235.

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reconciled with great difficulty with the republican spirit of America; on the other hand, it easily evoked the qualification “European”. But however perceived by others, this monarchic confidence was unquestionably at the basis, both in terms of temperament and intellectual predisposition, of the free affirmations of self Margaret Fuller inscribed in all of her writing. It was no accident that she used so widely the plural form of the first person pronoun: “we” in her writing does not evoke so much the authority of an Emersonian “representativeness” as the “regal” individual authority of my “mountain me”, in Fuller’s own words.16 This “mountain me” inevitably experienced the need to fit into the figure of the Woman of the Nineteenth Century: Margaret Fuller’s book with the same title, published in New York in 1845, considered as one of the first feminist manifestoes, develops Emerson’s idea of self-reliance from a woman’s point of view. The book quickly made its author famous not only in the intellectual circles of New York, but also, almost immediately, in England and Western Europe. In her native New England, Fuller had already established the model figure for the independent, self-reliant woman of spirit: the success of her Conversations on literature and art, which in no time became a Boston institution of a sort and which were organized on a regular basis with the daughters and wives of eminent New England intellectuals (among them Mrs Hawthorne and Mrs Emerson), proved her talent as an orator and testified to her personal charisma.17 The Conversations and Woman of the Nineteenth Century both insisted upon the idea of women’s self-reliance, self-reliance not only equal to that of men, but wholly identical to it (Emerson’s idea contains no such distinctions). But despite the recognition both received, they only emphasized, if not the foreignness of their author, certainly her otherness within the cultural context of her native country. Margaret Fuller’s regal ego experienced the need to define itself as the female ego of a queen. A year after the publication of Woman of the Nineteenth Century, a collection of Margaret Fuller’s critical works was published in New York under the title Papers on Literature and Art (1846). A year before that, again in New York, appeared her travelogue Summer on 16 See The Educated Woman in America: Selected Writings of Catherine Beecher, Margaret Fuller, eds Barbara M. Cross and M. Carey Thomas, New York: Teachers’ College Press, 1965, 112. 17 See Wade, Margaret Fuller, 71.

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the Lakes (1844) which related her travels in the Western territories of America. Precisely on the occasion of this latter book, written in the manner of Goethe’s Italian Journey, Orestes Brownson qualified Margaret Fuller as a “German”; it was also because of this book, filled with genuine admiration for the American West and its wilderness, that Horace Greeley, himself fascinated by the West, invited Fuller to become the literary editor of The New York Daily Tribune. These rather contradictory impressions her book produced about its author, “European” and “American” at the same time, lead Margaret Fuller to her true role as a literary critic, as well as, finally, to her long cherished Europe. In a letter from her ample correspondence from Europe, Fuller would remark about Emerson: He sees much, learns much always, but loves not Europe. There is no danger of the idle intimations of other minds altering his course, more than of the moving of a star. He knows himself and his vocation.18

Margaret Fuller also knew herself and her vocation: she loved Europe and dreamt of writing a book on Goethe – yet, she boarded the ship to return to her native America.

18

Fuller, The Letters, V, 70-71.

PART THREE TRANSCENDENTALISM: A CREED OF SELF AND NATURE

CHAPTER NINE TRADITIONS AND INDIVIDUAL TALENT: EMERSON AND THOREAU No truer American existed than Thoreau.1

Self-Reliance In “The American Scholar”, Emerson’s speech delivered on 31 August 1837, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which almost instantaneously became the ethical-aesthetic manifesto of a whole generation of American intellectuals, Emerson ardently declared: In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, – free and brave .... The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature ... it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare all.2

It is not difficult to imagine why these words electrified Emerson’s audience of young Harvard graduates. The speech must have evoked a whole new universe in which the creative individual, God-like and omnipotent in his absolute trust in himself, comprehended the world as the symbol of his own spirituality and the laws of nature as the laws of his own intellect. In fact, Emerson was offering an alternative, attractive also in its elitism, to a certain kind of social resignation brought about by “the disgust which the principles on which business [was] managed inspire[d]”.3 Following “The American Scholar”, the notion of “vocation” became essential for the New England intellectuals, who all attempted to apply it in a variety of unconventional ways. The oration made an exalted and inspiring appeal to those “young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all 1

Emerson, Selected Essays, 346. Ibid., 94-95. 3 Ibid., 99. 2

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the stars of God” – but young men, also, who “find the earth below not in unison with these [winds and stars]”.4 With uncompromising clarity, Emerson depicted the only possible salvation from such dissatisfaction with life: “if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” 5 Four years later, he would write his famous essay “SelfReliance”, placing the emphasis, with even greater force, upon the individual’s own self, which, free from imitation and conformity, deserved supreme (self-)trust; in 1837, Emerson’s words, no less fervent and firm, were addressed directly to the graduating class of Harvard College – among whose ranks most probably was the young Thoreau. “The American Scholar” was an inspired and illuminated speech meant itself to inspire and illuminate; moreover, in the eyes of the young and promising audience at Harvard, the figure conjured by the words must have presented itself as if embodied in the masterful, brave and free-spirited orator Ralph Waldo Emerson. The impression must have been extraordinary, and the challenge it posed even more so. But if the influence of Emerson’s speech remained above all intellectual for most of his listeners, opening new horizons above which thought could soar, the twenty-year-old Thoreau took its message as more than an intellectual exercise. Not only his way of thinking, but his way of life, his whole being was called upon to meet a new challenge. In this early period of Thoreau’s life, Emerson’s words, but more importantly, the actual meeting with the person, proved exceptionally fruitful. The time of “The American Scholar” was a period of self-definition for Thoreau – at this juncture in time he undertook the path to self-knowledge and hence, to self-reliance. A Harvard graduate already, Thoreau became a member of the Hedge Club, the informal club of the New England Transcendentalists, which included Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, Frederic Henry Hedge, George Ripley, Jones Very, Elizabeth Peabody, Bronson Alcott and Theodore Parker. This group of intellectuals, all bright artistic natures with liberal religious views, of whom some were acting Unitarian priests while others devoted their time mostly to teaching, writing and oratory, conducted its regular meetings in Concord. Indeed, under Emerson’s unquestionable 4 5

Ibid., 99. Ibid., 100.

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spiritual leadership, the rich and elevating art of the philosophical discussion flourished, and the idea of “the American scholar” could find its likeliest incarnations. The American scholar came to life in the living speech of this unique intellectual and artistic milieu, where the notion of high calling found ideal conditions to become an actual vocation. But life outside those gatherings remained problematic for the aspiring American scholar; the only practical, but far from sufficient, professional alternative was to read lectures at the newly established New England lyceum. Emerson’s construct, despite being extraordinarily attractive and inspiring, was too far removed from reality, too ideal, in order to be applicable outside the ideal environment of the exclusive, elitist, spiritual milieu of the Hedge Club. The isolation of self which Emerson sanctified proved to be a blessing only as a state of mind, which was no small thing in itself, but Emerson was actually pleading for something more: “Life is our dictionary .... Thinking is the function. Life is the functionary.”6 The question here does not concern the ideal overlap, or, rather, the actual distance between high calling and professional career which caused so many tragic failures and break-downs in the lives of the New England Transcendentalists; it concerns the truly inward-directed gaze, which Emerson was able to encourage but not so much to incite in reality. Only Thoreau, then twenty years old, started on a real-life self-quest, arriving later at true self-reliance. And he was inspired not so much by the rhetorical power of Emerson’s ideas but by Emerson’s personality. Although Thoreau’s interest in Emerson’s work remained limited to his early essays and poetry, his personality never lost its power of fascination. 7 This was particularly true in the early years when Thoreau was in the process of defining himself. In the favorable environment of intellectual daring and creative effervescence created by the Transcendentalists, it was Emerson’s extraordinary personal presence which inspired in Thoreau a sense of responsibility towards his own self. The notion of self-reliance began to take the shape of a deliberately chosen vocation to live a real life, a life, as Thoreau would later observe in Walden, which one could not qualify in retrospect as never having been lived. In that same year, 1837, Thoreau took two extremely important steps: he changed his name from David Henry to Henry David, and he began writing his journal. 6 7

Ibid., 91. See Harding, A Thoreau Handbook, 109.

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Thoreau’s attention to his name can be seen as a symptom of his need to identify himself: he deliberately chose to turn his given name into a form of self-expression. At first sight, the change is insignificant, a mere rearrangement. But this apparently unimportant switching of proper names hides the reversal of a whole universe: first becomes last, last becomes first, what was originally given becomes of one’s own choice, no longer imposed from the outside, but coming from the inside. The twenty-year-old Thoreau preferred to name the “I” on which he had already decided to concentrate all his aspirations and efforts. And just as this “I” was deliberately turned into the beginning of all beginnings, the center of self-reliance, so the name which represented it before the world had to undertake a journey of selfrecognition. The desire for adequacy is more than evident in young Thoreau: his name and his identity had to partake of the same essence – both had to be the result of a conscious choice and a creative act. From this perspective, accepting one’s given name can begin to appear as conformity, something unacceptable for Thoreau – above all, because of the responsibility he felt towards himself. He adopted as his first name Henry, and from then on, the name David could no longer refer to him directly. In following Henry, David became merely the euphonious transition to the family name: the sequence Henry David is certainly more sonorous than David Henry. The first vowel “e” is more definite as a sound than the “ambivalent” diphthong in David and so makes a more clear-cut beginning, while the consonant “d” enhances the stop of the “th” in Thoreau. There can be no doubt that Thoreau, a master of linguistic subtlety and nuance, was aware of the phonetic aspects of the change. To make his name mellifluous must have been important to him, but, at the same time, could hardly have served as his main motivation. We can only guess here, as despite all the attention Thoreau accorded to his own personal history, he left no comment on his name-change. But the lack of written record should not be overinterpreted, and can probably be explained by the fact that the twentyyear-old Thoreau had not yet developed the habit of noting down his observations, while later, the name having become a customary thing, he perhaps saw no particular interest in commenting on it. At the same time, the lack of specific commentary on the name-change should not undermine the significance of the act itself, yet this is precisely what happens in the larger part of criticism on Thoreau: those scholars who

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focus on the facts merely place the change of name among other factual events in Thoreau’s life, at most glossing it as a typical Romantic gesture (Walter Harding), whereas those who favor interpretation usually ignore the change on the presumption that a writer David Henry Thoreau simply never existed (Sherman Paul, Perry Miller, etc.), or that the great writer, the master of language and style came into existence with the name “Henry David Thoreau”. This latter statement is true – just as it is true that scholars can feel deeply grateful that Thoreau has captured in words so many significant moments of his life, and so, has left them endless interpretation possibilities. But even if not commemorated in words, the nascent writer’s conscious act of self-naming is evident. Thoreau chose his name deliberately. The act could be seen – and should be seen – as the preliminary step to that other extremely significant choice to go and live by Walden Pond, where the writer Henry David Thoreau was truly born; it can be seen as a stepping stone to those great words recorded at Walden: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.”8 Thoreau’s name change constitutes an early conscious act establishing, in today’s terms, a correlation between signifier and signified, or, in Emerson’s terms, a “correspondence” between personal identity and creative work, between self-recognition and selfnaming as a form of self-expression – or, finally, between life and art. This change is the earliest demonstration of an explicit awareness of the need to correlate language and essence. At its basis, Thoreau’s change of name is a linguistic act necessitated and defined by his choice to build his own identity. And as a linguistic act, it can be seen as a work of art in itself, the first in a series of works traversed by the same clarity of revelation found at the beginning of Walden: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well.”9 Thoreau’s great narrative of self, in fact, began with the creation of his name. In this sense, no further commentary on the fact was necessary, and it is no surprise that Thoreau never left one. Self-knowledge and language were already connected in an inseparable, organic whole. “A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon 8 9

Thoreau, Walden, 67. Ibid., 1.

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his love of truth and his desire to communicate it without loss.”10 This statement from Emerson’s Nature (1836) obviously left its impression on the young Thoreau (as did the whole book, which Thoreau read at Harvard before hearing Emerson’s “The American Scholar”). But Thoreau transformed Emerson’s abstractions into concrete terms, the way he would repeatedly do, starting thus a sort of tradition, by applying the ideas to his real life and his real person. At the age of twenty, Thoreau “connected his thought”, his inner nature, with what he believed to be “its proper symbol” – his given name reversed. Having done this “without loss”, he began communicating the truth about himself – again, through himself. “Words are signs of natural facts”, 11 Emerson asserts in the chapter on language in Nature. It follows logically that words and natural facts have to be in complete, perfect harmony. “The natural fact” of Henry David Thoreau comes into being precisely in the perfect harmony with its corresponding name; the natural fact becomes fact first in the linguistic act of naming. Even if the change of name was the only example of such self-choice, the conclusion would still be evident – Henry David Thoreau was concentrated on his own self to such an extent that, although very young, he could not become anyone’s follower, not even Emerson’s. Ralph Waldo Emerson did not see any lack of correspondence between his self and its symbol, his given name. The reversal to “Waldo Ralph” never took place (no matter Emerson preferred to be addressed as “Waldo”); Emerson’s notion of “correspondence” is above all an inspired – and inspiring, especially in the case of Thoreau – abstraction. The relationship between the two authors, their “correspondence”, would follow the same pattern in the years to come. Another aspect in Thoreau’s name change is also noteworthy. As far as the act did not amount to deciding on a completely new name, but only reversed the order of given names, Thoreau did not invent a pseudonym. So, etymologically speaking, he did not create a falsename, but simply emended the natural appellation with which his life journey had begun. This fact is particularly interesting and revealing, especially from the point of view of that “sign of our times”, defined by Emerson as “the new importance given to the single person”12 – the 10

Emerson, Selected Essays, 29. Ibid., 27. 12 Ibid., 99. 11

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significance all Romantics assigned to the individual as the beginning of all beginnings, which also involved particular awareness of the processes of naming. This same intensified need for linguistic adequacy gave birth to the notion of “organic poetry” (S.T. Coleridge), close in conception to the notion of the organic relation between the poet and his name. European Romanticism provides plenty of examples of authors changing their names: Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg thus became Novalis, the poet who would write verses and prose infused with the mystical scent of the blue flower; Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin Dudevant became the notorious talented novelist George Sand; and Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, very much under the powerful influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, won renown as the critic and writer Jean Paul. But whether a pen name having nothing in common with the author’s original name, or a transcription in a foreign language and/or an abbreviation of given names, in all these cases, the choice fell on a pseudonym, that is, on a false name, untrue in as much as it differed from the one given at birth. As a result, the person acquired two names – an artistic pseudonym for his or her life as an author, and a natural given name for his or her real life. (That is why, as a rule, literary encyclopaedias cite the pseudonym followed by the original name in parentheses.) In fact, such a personality split was desired and convenient. The Romantics, with their characteristic taste for extreme contrasts, gave the practice even greater than usual prominence, because the personality split was seen as one more expression of the incompatibility between the ideal world of art and the real world of phenomena. What is more, the notions of falsehood and truth, as proper to these two worlds, then exchanged places, so the pseudonym, the false name, began to appear truer than the true given name. In the case of the European Romantics, these self-baptisms, chosen pseudonyms, can be comprehended as part of the game of irreconcilable contrasts – a game whose expression became the personality of the author too. No such thing happened with Thoreau. An element of playfulness, where the truth of being was concerned, would have been inconceivable in his case. The seriousness with which the American Transcendentalists attempted to correlate life and art, and which was to become so pronounced in Thoreau in particular, is unambiguously present, even at this early stage, in young Thoreau’s attempt to

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establish a correspondence between the identity he was beginning to build and its verbal expression. And Thoreau’s self-reference was not pseudo-nymous but “verito-nymous”. He reversed the order of his natural names to arrive at the appellation he felt was the most natural. This fact is even more revelatory and significant in the light of his later complete identification with the essence, with that state of “a strange liberty in Nature”, when he felt “a part of herself”, as he would write in Walden. 13 The result was one name only – Henry David Thoreau – which would imply no division between an artistic and a real-life persona, but would come to be seen as the true name, corresponding to the inseparability of art and life Thoreau embodied. Since it is not a pseudonym, the name “Henry David” does not need glossing and even encyclopaedias rarely provide any annotations; “David Henry”, on the other hand, if at all mentioned, remains of the order of an insignificant biographical detail – and merely a biographical detail because Thoreau started his autobiography as Henry David. Biography had no importance for Thoreau; all that mattered was autobiography. Biography was the sign of conformity, whereas the true, non-conformist form of being consisted in writing one’s own autobiography – creating, both in deed and in words, a life of one’s own will. Thoreau marked the beginning of his autobiography by naming himself. It was an act of self-initiation, of self-naming but not self-renaming – a second birth, no less natural than the first one, but this time with the conscious participation of the self. In later years, Thoreau would often and gladly contemplate his own name (as well as many other names, especially Native American ones), finding in it quasi-etymological connections to his liking, whether a distant association with “thoroughness”, hence considering it right to place the stress on the first syllable of “Thoreau” (the way his name is still pronounced in the Boston area), or an a priori relation with Thor, the Scandinavian god of thunder and of agriculture.14 But his later interest was philological rather than existential. Henry David was free to pursue such preoccupations, because he had already become “the Namer” and “the Language-maker”, as Emerson would define the American Poet. What is more, he had already blended his life with the image of that poet. It was then possible to play on the 13

Thoreau, Walden, 97. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, New York: The Library of America, 1985, 983.

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meaning of the name, but such play would be of no real significance. Of primary importance was something else: the constant flowing expression of a self already identified and named. Thoreau began to write his journal. October 22, 1837. “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry today.”15 These are the first words Thoreau recorded in his Journal. Over the years, the Journal would steadily grow, surpassing two million words, changing its character and its role until it became ultimately an essential element of being, a unique in its accomplishment philosophical investigation of life and art. The beginning of this journal marked the beginning of the written autobiography of Henry David Thoreau. It is worth observing that the first entry in the Journal recorded a dialogue. Although Thoreau did not mention who stood behind the pronoun “he”, it is almost certain that the person was Emerson. The relationship between the two men, over the years increasingly conflict-ridden and complex, was indeed more than instrumental in this early period of self-definition for Thoreau. Emerson’s words – both written and delivered ex cathedra, but above all exchanged in the immediacy of personal conversation – mobilized, brought to the fore and accentuated as significant everything which young Thoreau already valued in himself. The powerful challenge Emerson posed, both in intellectual and in existential terms, elicited a uniquely personal and all-encompassing response from Thoreau, who must have needed the inspiration of such an encounter in his youth. But perhaps the omission of the name in the dialogic beginning of the Journal was not accidental. Even so early, Thoreau was apparently exhibiting the kind of behavior which he later expected from the readers of Walden – namely, to “accept such portions as apply to them”.16 The question “Do you keep a journal” clearly “applied” to Thoreau in 1837, so he began to write a journal. He could have begun that journal in any number of ways. He nevertheless – still – felt it should begin in dialogue with, in “response” to .… The Journal’s opening lines, in fact, were not written only in answer to Emerson; they were a response to a great and old tradition 15

Henry David Thoreau, Selections from the Journals, ed. Walter Harding, New York: Dover Publications, 1995, 1. 16 Thoreau, Walden, 1.

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under whose influence Thoreau had grown up. “In the tradition of New England, it was respectable – nay, even imperative – that youths compose diaries”, Perry Miller observes.17 “The benefits of keeping a journal” was a commonly assigned topic in the rhetoric courses at Harvard. As early as his college years at Harvard, Thoreau conscientiously – and to a large degree, presciently – outlined three such benefits: the “preservation of our scattered thoughts”; selfexpression; and self-improvement.18 The last of these was particularly important not only for Thoreau, but for his fellow thinkers in general. New England’s Puritan spirit is definitely discernible in the idea that the pursuit of self-knowledge, rather than an end in itself, formed the path to the highest end of all – the building of moral character. All Transcendentalists kept diaries – Emerson himself, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller. And just like their Puritan forefathers, they all undertook the task with particular seriousness and responsibility. In 1838, Emerson and Alcott were both claiming that the personal diary was the best – meaning, the most truthful – book of all.19 That was only a year after Thoreau himself had ventured into the immeasurable depths of that truth, to reveal its beauty, with the time passing, the way no other ever did. “In thy journals let there never be a jest!”20 – this imperative of truthful being Thoreau would follow with ever greater dedication over the years. He absorbed the direct influences of his New England milieu, whether Puritan or Transcendental, not simply giving life to his Journal, but giving his own life to it. “So I make my first entry today”, he wrote, but with the first entry in the Journal, with it and through it, Thoreau also entered his conscious life, defined from now on only by his own life-choice. “Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal?” 21 By the 1850s, already mature, Thoreau would be making such revelations, grasping more 17

Perry Miller, Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau’s Hitherto ‘Lost Journal’ (1840-1841) Together with Notes and a Commentary, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958, 46. 18 See F. B. Sanborn, The Life of Henry David Thoreau, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917, 73-74. 19 The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds William H. Gillman at al., 16 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960-1982, V, 99. 20 Thoreau, The Journal, III, 222. 21 Ibid., X, 115.

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clearly the significance of journal-keeping in his life or, rather, grasping the significance of his life through journal-writing. In rhetorical questions and exclamations such as these, it is worth noting at least two things: first, the journal kept should be “a good journal”; and second, the good journal gives thought and expression to what the poet, not just anyone, is “bound” to do. In both cases, the emphasis falls on art as the supreme end of life – whether in giving expression to it or in being its vocation, its bound destination. The poet’s calling becomes commensurate with keeping a journal; what is more, the two overlap in as much as they come to express the Transcendentalist supreme synthesis between art and life. The journal, according to Thoreau, and according to Emerson, Alcott, M. Fuller and the rest of the Transcendentalists, is the best work and the best book because there is no other more adequate, more corresponding expression of – and path to – self-reliance. The journal – by the way, even better in its absolute freedom from genre-specific constraints – is seen as giving a supremely truthful, and hence particularly important, expression to the self. But the question of what exactly this self amounts to and how one prefers to form its image remains open. “Journalizing was a more complex and difficult affair for the Transcendentalists than for their ancestors”, Lawrence Buell points out. “The latter ... did not have to ask who they were and what the value of an individual was, but simply how they stood in relation to the state of grace – which was a big question, to be sure, but a much more clearly defined one.”22 The New England Transcendentalists, like true Romantics, praised the uniqueness of the individual; therefore, in their eyes journal-writing itself became the unique record of unique individual experience. For the same reason – and it may seem paradoxical but it is, in fact, quite logical – their journals strongly resemble one another: in praising the uniqueness of individual experience, they universalize it. The Transcendentalist’s journal, as a rule, began with an emphatic interest in everything which testified to the singularity of the self, and then, without effort, that interest was directed to everything which testified to the divine and universal nature of the individual. As a result, the fragile, fallible self transformed itself into an authoritative, often imperious voice.23 (It is important to observe that, as discussed previously, given the identity crisis undergone by the Transcend22 23

Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 275. Ibid., 283.

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entalists due to the lack of satisfactory career options, such stabilization of the self was not only desirable but also their saving grace. Thus, to keep a journal could appear as a vocation in itself, a path to fulfillment, even a profession.) Precisely in this manner, the Transcendentalists appropriated and transformed the New England tradition of journal-writing with which all of them were brought up – they introduced as its absolute centre a modern self, whose human frailty was overcome through selectiveness and deifying universalization. All Transcendentalists followed this tendency, albeit to differing degrees. And as with everything else, their journals can be placed within the spectrum defined by the two great, yet so different, talents among them: Emerson and Thoreau. And this spectrum would become more and more clearly defined over the years. “Well, & what do you project?” – Emerson asks in his Journal. “Nothing less than to look at every object in its relation to Myself”,24 he replies and, without effort, blends “Myself” with “Thyself” and so with “Man himself”. With all the complexity of nuance in the relations between Emerson’s journal entries and his finished works, the suprapersonal or exemplary “representative me” retains a central place in everything he wrote.25 Even in the Journal, Emerson’s individual is unique only in so far as he is universal. This Emersonian predisposition, whether qualified as “abstraction”, “lack of immediacy” or even “prophetism”, determined Emerson’s unconditional authority over the other Transcendentalists (and not only over them). Its original expression, later elaborated in his lectures, essays and books, can be found precisely in his Journal. Emerson’s universalized individual, so attractive and inspiring in his God-like stature, did not, however, necessarily evoke the same or even similar in scope responses. Emerson himself was aware of the fact. When he first remarked on Thoreau’s extraordinary ability “to infer the universal law from the single fact”, 26 not only was he making an acute observation as a literary critic, but also – and perhaps above all – he was making a comparison between himself and Thoreau. The comparison, moreover, was to Thoreau’s advantage. And although Emerson meant mainly 24

Emerson, The Journals, IV, 272. Jonathan Bishop, Emerson on the Soul, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964, 130. 26 Emerson, The Complete Works, X, 474. 25

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Thoreau’s poetic gift to capture details in their vivid immediacy and draw general truths from them – something his own “sleepy generality”,27 he knew very well, could not achieve – his commentary contained another subtle praise, beyond Thoreau’s ability as a poet. Emerson emphasized the importance of “the single fact” for Thoreau. Thoreau’s sensitivity to detail impressed him all the more as his own mind tended to blur contours and erase the distinctions between things: Emerson was outlining two different styles of writing, but, more importantly, he was pointing to their underlying differences in ways of thinking and perceiving. If Emerson searched for the universal, Thoreau observed the singular detail; while Emerson retained only the universal law, Thoreau preserved the single fact also. The first manifestation of this correlation between the two men’s intellectual dispositions may be seen in the dialogic beginning of young Thoreau’s journal: to Emerson’s claim that for the “representative I” to keep a journal is almost a matter of “universal law”, Thoreau replies by directing his gaze to the “single fact”, to Henry David himself. As a result, both in his Journal and in his other works, Thoreau paints a vivid image of himself and almost never refers to the “representative me”. “If Thoreau is today considered the most memorable character among the Transcendentalists”, virtually all critics would agree, “it is because his writings evoke most strongly the sense of a man behind the book”.28 In this sense, Thoreau does not simply represent or illustrate an idea: he did not identify with the idea, whether Emerson’s or someone else’s, he identified the idea with himself. “From first to last, all his work was devoted to telling not only how he had lived but how alive he had been, how much life he had got”, Sherman Paul aptly observes.29 And for Henry Thoreau, “every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour”;30 the moments of such true life he would zealously pour into words. Spending one’s time without any spiritual illumination, he considered a “frittering away”,31 or a fatal loss of concentration. That was why he appealed for “simplifying”, for 27

Ibid., IX, 522. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 296. 29 Paul, Repossessing and Renewing, 14. 30 Thoreau, Walden, 67. 31 Ibid., 68. 28

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concentration upon the essences, and was himself methodically doing that, even with regard to his journal writing. “I wish to communicate those parts of my life which I would gladly live again myself”, he wrote in his journal as early as 1842.32 Several years later, convinced that one had to give expression only to one’s joy, and not to dyspeptic thoughts, he firmly declared in Walden that he did not intend to write “an ode to dejection” but to sing “as lustily as chanticleer in the morning”, noting, in passing, that he went to live by the pond in order “to transact some private business”, which he then describes metaphorically, as “trade with the Celestial Empire” 33 and allegorically, through the ambiguous story of the lost hound, bay horse and turtle-dove.34 And in his essay “Life Without Principle”, on which he continued to work even in his last days, he suggests that people should meet not in order to tell of their bad dreams, but “to congratulate each other on the ever-glorious morning”.35 Very early in his life, Thoreau decided that only the illuminated moments of his life deserved to be communicated and preserved in words. To put it differently, “the single fact” named Henry David Thoreau decided to communicate “single facts” about himself – those facts with which he wished to identify. This choice was not simply a question of inner tact, but above all the expression of his clear awareness that he was writing, sentence by sentence, devotedly, his spiritual autobiography. It was, moreover, a matter of conscious effort, of a deliberate choice to merge life biography and spiritual biography, or, rather, to meld the first into the latter, sublimating the energy of life into its supreme form of life-as-revelation.36 In this sense, how alive Thoreau had been became identical to how much he had succeeded in achieving that life-as-revelation to which he always aspired. The vital importance this had for Thoreau is visible in every line he wrote – hence the strong “sense of a man behind the book”. And the sense of the man “behind the book” is felt even stronger when the harmonious wholeness of this desired life was fissured or threatened, or when the joyful illumination, the only one worth communicating, lost its brightness. In this respect, Thoreau’s Journal 32

Thoreau, Selections from the Journals, 3. Thoreau, Walden, 13. 34 Ibid., 11. 35 Thoreau, The Essays, 90. 36 See Walter Harding, “Thoreau’s Sexuality”, Journal of Homosexuality, XXIII/3 (1991), 23-45. 33

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is extremely valuable, because it alone among his works expresses, even if tentatively, his yearning for “his lost senses”, that desire which brought with it the bitter inner torment he struggled to suppress (discussed earlier in another connection), but also because, over the years, the Journal changed form, becoming, in the last decade of his life, his most important work, his very source of vitality. “By 1851, Thoreau is writing not only in his Journal but for it as well”, rightly observes Daniel Peck,37 while Perry Miller asserts, going even further, that after 1850, Thoreau’s Journal evolved into “a deliberately constructed work of art”.38 Over the years, Thoreau’s Journal came to be a work apart from his other writings, important to him in a different way. It ceased to be the repository of first thoughts, drafts later to be used in other writings, but acquired incomparable value in itself. It grew into the life-and-art work where the mature Henry David Thoreau could find his vocation, the means to sustain, and give expression to, the changing nature of his self-reliance. In the early years of his experiment at Walden Pond, Thoreau noted down in his Journal: From all points of the compass, from the earth beneath and the heavens above, have come these inspirations and been entered duly in the order of their arrival in the journal. Thereafter, when the time arrived, they were winnowed into lectures, and again, in due time, from lectures into essays.39

The facts are even less ambiguous: in those years, Thoreau did not simply follow the usual practice of most Transcendentalists, writing in his journal and later revising the text into an essay and a book, but, without hesitation – without, in fact, any “winnowing” – literally cut passages from the journal and placed them entire in the drafts of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden. Yet, this note from the Journal, written about ten years later, in July 1852, is equally unambiguous: “A journal, a book that shall contain all your joy, all your ecstasy.” 40 These words constitute a definition of the 37

H. Daniel Peck, “Killing Time / Keeping Time: Thoreau’s Journal and the Art of Memory”, in The Green American Tradition: Essays and Poems for Sherman Paul, ed. H. Daniel Peck, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1989, 49. 38 Miller, Consciousness in Concord, 4. 39 Thoreau, Selections from the Journals, 3. 40 Ibid., 13.

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journal as a book in itself. The future tense here is revelatory: after all the years of journal-writing since 1837, Thoreau decided that, in the future, he will transform the journal, indeed, into “the best of all books”, the best for Thoreau himself, in terms of his own life. “Thoreau’s Journal is a lifework, in the sense that it ultimately became his central concern, but also in the literal sense that it belonged to his life”, Daniel Peck writes: “It is as much a part of that life as are the writer's daily walks, to which it is closely related.” 41 Furthermore, Thoreau’s Journal gradually assumed that Homeric, ancient epic capacity of language not simply to commemorate into eternity but also to conjure, through words, reality into existence. If he had not kept his journal in his mature years, the mature Henry David Thoreau would not have truly existed – not so much for his readers, who have at their disposal his other writings, but mainly for himself. From 1850 onward, then, the Journal constituted the fulfillment of the last ten years of Thoreau’s life. It was no longer a response to any kind of challenge from the outside: “Do you keep a journal?” was not Emerson’s question anymore, but came to represent Thoreau’s own existential and creative imperative. The presence of the man behind the book seems to become in the late Journal even more vivid, to a large degree already the presence of the man for the book, the man thanks to the book. The man behind and the man in the book thus aspired towards complete identity. That is why, although the Journal remained the record of “all your joy, all your ecstasy”, it let transpire every now and then the pressing lament for lost youth. But above all the Journal of the mature Thoreau transformed – and gave a compensatory expression to – that sense of wholeness characteristic of his once harmonious Transcendentalist worldview. Thoreau’s dedication to his journal in the final ten years of his life amounted to living in wholeness, and hence to regaining selfreliance. As a result, the Journal itself acquired an aspect of wholeness which it could not have possessed before. The almost daily entries no longer look like the disparate and disorganized materials stored for future use, but are laid as essential and inseparable elements of a verbal construction significant in and for the moment of writing. However, the mature Journal can be described as “a deliberately constructed work of art” only in so far as it is indeed an independent 41

Peck, “Killing Time”, 46.

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literary artifact of high achievement, reflecting Thoreau’s new attitude towards journal-writing as an occupation of inherent value. But Thoreau never assumed that transforming the Journal into a finished artwork could be an end in itself, as Miller’s definition suggests: not only because the daily entries in their very form, in their characteristic open-endedness, exclude the notion of a closed structure, but above all because these notes captured in words the high moments of a real life of the spirit, the perpetual movement of brilliant thought, to which writing was of vital necessity, to continue its walking. The artistic perfection of these journal entries is beyond doubt; they are enchanting – Thoreau in the late Journal is already a magnificent master of style. But they serve also a clearly practical purpose. In the beginning of February 1851 Thoreau notes: I would fain keep a journal which should contain those thoughts & impressions which I am most liable to forget that I have had. Which would have, in one sense the greatest remoteness – in another, the greatest nearness, to me.42

The Journal was, then, a means of warding off oblivion, an art of memory. It had always, in fact, fulfilled that purpose, but in his mature years Thoreau emphasized the journal’s capacity to make real the stream of perceptions and thoughts – no longer with a view to future written works, but because these sustained the foundation of his very existence. Thoreau rediscovered the practice of journal-writing, reappropriating his previous experience, while giving it profoundly new meaning. That is why the Journal of these mature years gives the impression of wholeness – the wholeness of mature thought, whose range includes both “the greatest remoteness” and “the greatest nearness” but whose absolute centre is clearly – “myself”. And the sublime poetic beauty of the writing organically belongs to that wholeness: its overpowering force makes the unique presence of the man Thoreau almost palpable. Here is, for instance, what Thoreau writes in February 1854: To make a perfect winter day like this, you must have a clear, sparkling air, with a sheen from the snow, sufficient cold, little or no 42

Thoreau, Selections from the Journals, 10.

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Visibility Beyond the Visible wind; and the warmth must come directly from the sun. It must not be thawing warmth. The tension of nature must not be relaxed. The earth must be resonant if bare, and you hear ... the unrelenting steel-cold scream of a jay, unmelted, that never flows into a song, a sort of wintry trumpet, screaming cold; hard, tense, frozen music, like the winter sky itself; in the blue livery of winter’s band.43

To be able to write such a passage in a journal, one needs the poet’s eyes and gift for words. Moreover, to be able to write these words not elsewhere but in a journal, the man and the poet in one have to form an inseparable whole. This winter day of Thoreau’s remains forever: captured as it is in words, and literally perhaps “in pace” too (it is known that in those years he always carried his journal with him), Thoreau makes it real, in a permanent way, to himself as well; this making real, however, is achieved through poetry – and the perfection of the winter day becomes universalized, charged with the enduring beauty of a magnificent poem. Many, many other days in Thoreau’s life are similarly transfigured. From this perspective, the Journal, which by its very genredefinition has to rely on confessions and revelations, is the most vivid document bearing witness to the true synthesis of life and art in Thoreau. The question, therefore, arises what kind and what degree of intimacy the Journal provides. Thoreau’s Journal was begun and was maintained as an organic part of the general practice of journal-writing among the Transcendentalists, and so shared many of its typical features. Although by definition a private occupation, journal-writing at the time had a strong, clearly pronounced, public function: it was quite common for the Transcendentalists to exchange parts of their diaries and discuss them afterwards, or even publish extracts in their magazine The Dial. Journal-writing was emblematic among the Transcendentalists’ intellectual and spiritual preoccupations, and so, sharing and publishing parts of their journals served to legitimize their intellectual and spiritual belonging to the group. The private journals, therefore, exhibited supra-personal characteristics, which were the result both of the influence of Emerson’s idea of the “Over-Soul” (discussed earlier) and of the public aspect of the practice of journalwriting in general. (At this period in New England, whose Puritan 43

Ibid., 19.

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traditions the Transcendentalists themselves revived and redefined, this public aspect implied strong self-censorship.) The Transcendentalists’ journals amounted to unique representative confessionssermons: the corresponding expression – and reflection – of the PoetPriest, or the Emersonian American Scholar. “That which is individual & remains individual in my experience is of no value”, Emerson records in his Journal: “What is fit to engage me & so engage others permanently, is what has put off its weeds of time & place & and personal relation.”44 Everything written by the Transcendentalists, including their journals, to a lesser or a greater degree follows this prescription. “Do you keep a journal?” was, in reality, a question of legitimacy to which all members of the Hedge Club could not but answer in the positive. And the question itself presupposed, and required, a selective response, one that “has put off the weeds of time & place & and personal relation”. Thoreau’s determination to write always, in each of his works, only of the moments of joy and inspiration, clearly shows that he observed the principle of selection Emerson advocated. The difference between the two authors, however, is significant: while Emerson considered the supra-individual (the general) to be valuable, and, accordingly, the individual (the private) to be of no value, Thoreau distinguished between illuminated states of mind and states of mind devoid of illumination. Instead of separating, like Emerson, the individual from the supra-individual, Thoreau attempted, with profound seriousness and persistent effort, to make the two identical – in his own person and through his own person. The process was one of selection but of an entirely different kind – Thoreau chose, early on, to simplify his individual life to the extent that it became the sole life of a poet, writing and living, both at the same time, the harmonious autobiography of his spiritual illuminations. (That is why the receding brightness of that harmony, as pointed out elsewhere, brought for Thoreau a serious existential crisis which would have been entirely foreign to Emerson.) Thoreau’s choice had two main consequences, both somehow predetermined. He remained the “bachelor of Nature” (Emerson’s words), the eccentric from Concord, who led blueberrypicking parties, while Emerson became the eminent, wealthy, respected head of a big family. Thoreau’s writing, however, especially in his mature Journal, gives the sense of sharing with perfect 44

Emerson, The Journals, VII, 65.

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wholeness (thoroughness), and so creates a special kind of intimacy which is entirely absent in Emerson. Hence his writing emanates the sense of the man behind the book – of Henry David Thoreau who did not select the extent to which to share his life but who approached life itself selectively. The principle of selection Thoreau applied was purely poetic. This being the case – although his greatest aspiration was to accomplish in deed, to give concrete meaning to Emerson’s idea of self-reliance – Thoreau was much more than a simple follower of Emerson, both in his life and in his writings. In fact, Emerson’s ideas were widely disseminated thanks to Emerson himself. Emerson was the fiery orator, the open enemy of all kinds of conformity, the famous lecturer in whose person the audience, as a rule, saw the incarnation of the Poet-Priest. Emerson was the active public figure, which Thoreau never was. Thoreau was less a man of action and much more the contemplative type. His main field of action was writing; his selfreliance was above all the self-reliance of the writer. When inspired by Emerson’s idea in his youth, he directed his gaze inwards, he fully identified himself as a writer. That was his true, consciously embraced vocation which would shape his life, and which would give him life. That was the deliberate life he chose, impossible, inconceivable without writing. Thoreau wrote in order to make happen his moments of illumination – to make them real to himself, but also, always and everywhere, with the awareness that his writing was addressed to an audience. And his message was above all a literary one. The preaching tone Thoreau occasionally assumes, reminiscent of Emerson, can be seen as the manifestation of his need as a poet (as a writer) to communicate with an implied reader, to feel constantly a reader’s presence. This is true even in the Journal, because his is to a great extent the journal of a writer. (By contrast, Emerson’s Journal, even if all such definitions leave room for argument, was mostly the journal of a thinker.) Despite the fact that Thoreau began his Journal in response, almost as if to fulfill the obligatory requirement for entry into the Transcendentalists’ circle, from the very beginning he defined the public aspect of his journal in a manner very different from that of the other Transcendentalists – his was the publicity of a work of literature. Pages from the early journal were included literally, physically in his first two books. More importantly, though, as the

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Journal acquired a different status (but did not change its poetic manner) in his later years, Thoreau did not abandon the idea of publishing it (as a work in itself).45 He kept his correspondence, by the way, with the same idea in view.46 Personal and supra-personal blend in Thoreau’s writing, in the wholeness and uniqueness of his self as a writer – in the perfect oneness of art and life. “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts”, Thoreau wrote in Walden47, adding in his Journal: “The best of art is artlessness.” 48 Such was the brilliant, artless harmony of Henry Thoreau – the great art of living gave the great life of his art. There was no room for being a disciple. Emerson was at the source of many impulses in Thoreau, and these, fruitful mostly in the period of “The American Scholar”, retained their imperativeness over the years. “That Thoreau survived such handling to become a classic author in his own right”, Lawrence Buell observes, “is little short of astonishing. Suffocation would have been far more likely.” 49 The explanation is in his literary talent: the great source of self-reliance for Henry David Thoreau. “Thoreau” In his eulogy of Thoreau Emerson says: He was a protestant à outrance, and few lives contain so many renunciations. He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely, no doubt, for himself, to be bachelor of thought and Nature.50

Emerson’s eulogy, later published as an essay under the title “Thoreau”, is generally considered by American literary scholars the 45

See Harding, “Note”, v-vi. See Bradley P. Dean, “Introduction” to Henry David Thoreau, Letters to a Spiritual Seeker, ed. Bradley P. Dean, New York-London: W. W. Norton, 2004, 22. 47 Thoreau, Walden, 67. 48 Thoreau, The Journal, I, 153. 49 Buell, Emerson, 297. 50 Emerson, Selected Essays, 342-43. 46

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best piece of writing on Thoreau.51 Also, it has certainly been the most influential in the reader reception of Thoreau. Precisely Emerson’s views set the terms of Thoreau’s entry, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the literary and cultural canon: he was seen as the odd genius, the eccentric “bachelor of thought and Nature”. Thus, the most widely read among Thoreau’s works at that time was a small selection of his thoughts on nature, published by Riverside Press, with Emerson’s essay “Thoreau” as an introduction. When the publication of Thoreau’s collected works in twenty volumes was being prepared, a literary event today often seen as marking his definitive recognition within the literary canon, the Boston publishers promoted the series by offering a free booklet with Emerson’s essay to everyone who wished to learn more about Thoreau before deciding whether to buy his works.52 Evidently, for a long time Thoreau was read through the lens of Emerson – he was identified with the image Emerson created of him, or, in the very least, he was invariably perceived in relation to Emerson. But who really was Emerson’s Thoreau? In what way did Emerson’s patronage continue after Thoreau’s death – who is “Thoreau”? The eulogy/essay is a testimony to Emerson’s complexly nuanced, and far from univocal or unambiguous attitude towards Thoreau. Emerson himself is strongly present in the text, both as an established, mature thinker, and as an old friend who shared many moments with Thoreau. As usual with Emerson, the first, representative persona dominates the essay; but the reason for this can be found not simply in Emerson’s characteristic intellectual disposition, but above all in the representative, public genre of the eulogy itself, whose function, as Emerson saw it, was to open the eyes of the “country [which] knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost”. Emerson subdues the expression of human sorrow for the untimely loss of Thoreau, fourteen years younger than he was, barely mentioning the heavy injury or the indignity in the end to a life still in its prime, emphasizing, instead, the consolation found in timeless values: “wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he [Thoreau] will find a home.”53 51

See Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 548. 52 Buell, Emerson, 298. 53 Emerson, Selected Essays, 359.

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In fact, Emerson portrays Thoreau through Emerson: inflecting his personal observations of Thoreau and interpreting his texts through the prism of his own theoretical constructs, already well known and influential at the time. Thus, based on his theoretical framework of values, he builds an image of Thoreau – an image of admiration and respect, but also the object of certain reservations. Emerson’s attitude was to an extent inevitable; in the eulogy, however, it seems to be deliberately underlined: the paternalist authority of the older, more mature and settled man can be felt in every sentence. Whether his judgment be entirely positive or partially reproachful, Emerson consistently maintains the distance determined by the difference in age and social recognition. His admiration does not turn into veneration, remaining, instead, within the bounds of authoritative approval, while his remarks sound closer to reprimands than to criticisms directed to an equal. Emerson continued to treat Thoreau as a young man, “a youth”, as he calls him at the beginning of the eulogy, the way he had always treated him while alive, demonstrating the attitude which to a great extent caused the cooling of their friendship around 1850.54 In accordance with the well-established method of the Transcendentalists, the larger part of “Thoreau” consists of extracts taken from Emerson’s Journal covering the years of closer relations between the two men. The text of the eulogy, then, was not composed spontaneously under the pressing grief for a friend who was gone, but presented an image of Thoreau which had taken shape gradually over the years. This fact may explain Emerson’s distance from the image, which embodied his years-long patronizing attitude towards the much younger Thoreau, and account for the supra-emotional tone, rather atypical in an eulogy (perhaps also serving to hide the unavoidable pain Emerson must have felt in that difficult moment). That Emerson had a text ready, which he simply revised into an eulogy on the occasion of Thoreau’s death, may seem at first sight contradictory, even somewhat unnatural compared to custom, but it was not unusual considering the Transcendentalist practice of daily journal-writing. Instead of attempting to transcend grief, Emerson’s text, in fact, precedes grief; it therefore presents – not the portrait of someone dead – but the image of someone full of life. And although it may also seem paradoxical at first sight, it is precisely Emerson’s emotional 54

See Thoreau, A Week, 1047.

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neutrality which in a particularly persuasive manner succeeds in immortalizing Thoreau beyond death. His attitude towards this image of a Thoreau brimming with life remained unchanged with the years; in life as in death, Emerson’s was the patronizing distance towards a youth “of the fairest promise”, to borrow his phrase from “The American Scholar”. Emerson took the position of the representative I, the high viewpoint from which he could see Thoreau through Emerson, and see him both as a genius and an oddity. Thanks to this elevated point of view Emerson’s pronouncements on Thoreau sound with the authority of ultimate truths, of unquestionable judgments, beyond which it would be inappropriate to venture a differing opinion (also one of the main reasons for the powerful influence of the essay). “He was a born protestant”: the sentence encapsulates Emerson’s perspective in evaluating Thoreau. Everything refers back to this statement, which, far from implying any conventional religious feeling, resounds with the inspired refrain from “Self-Reliance”: “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” In the case of Thoreau, Emerson meant precisely this by “a protestant” – a nonconformist: “He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well.” 55 He considered Thoreau’s absolute personal independence to be a virtue which, more than anything else, defined his genius, the genius to be “the man of men”, “a speaker of truth”, “sincerity itself”. Emerson had at this point already appropriated the traditional New England idea of moral self-improvement, redefining it as the development of a uniquely individual artistic nature; he had already created the figure of the Poet, fully devoted to truth bearer of creative energy. Over the years he had erected and elaborated his own ethic-aesthetic value system, whose application to the character of Thoreau must have been inevitable. And that is precisely what Emerson’s journal entries recording his friendship with Thoreau and later synthesized in his eulogy, testify to. That is why “Thoreau” echoes “The American Scholar” and “The Poet”, while the reverence towards truth unambiguously points to “Self-Reliance” and the ideas in “The OverSoul” and Nature. And, most importantly, in Emerson’s system of values, nonconformity stood at the very core, as that choice of character which guaranteed truth. “Thoreau” was a protestant, then, in 55

Emerson, Selected Essays, 342.

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the purest, in the “Puritan” sense of the word, etymologically speaking, as the representation of the high New England Renaissance mindset instilled with the first settlers’ creative energy: No college ever offered him a diploma, or a professor’s chair; no academy made him its corresponding secretary, its discoverer, or even its member. Perhaps these learned bodies feared the satire of his presence. Yet so much knowledge of Nature’s secret and genius few others possessed, none in a more large and religious synthesis. For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to the truth itself .… He grew to be revered and admired by his townsmen, who had at first known him only as an oddity …. They felt, too, the superiority of the character which addressed all men with a native authority.56

Emerson sees “the superiority of character” and Thoreau’s reverence to truth as correlated, even co-dependent qualities, whose very correlation gives that inviolable inner independence he glorified in “The Poet”: “the ideal shall be real to thee.”57 For Emerson, Thoreau had arrived at that ideal individual reality. The radical nature of Thoreau’s rejection of all forms of habit and convention was for Emerson the closest possible embodiment of the blissful, limitless freedom which could transform the creative individual into “a liberating God” (“The Poet”) – a liberated person bestowing liberty upon others. The sole condition for such freedom was the rejection of all conditions – the methodical, conscious relinquishment of all kinds of custom, especially those codified in institutions. To maintain such freedom, then, implied continuous negation. “Few lives contain so many renunciations”, 58 Emerson rightly observes. So within the framework of Emerson’s ideal abstraction, Thoreau’s nonconformity – his Protestantism – represented the highest of values: Whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in reference to churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender, and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or by thought …. Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the 56

Ibid., 352-53. Ibid., 224. 58 Ibid., 343. 57

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Emerson’s observations here, although filled with profound admiration, surpass the purely human feelings of respect, alluding, instead, to the idealized greatness of first settlers’ Puritanism. Emerson sees in Thoreau the rebirth of ancestral spirituality, of that high, purified, extreme form of Protestantism, free from institutional constraint and professing unmediated communion with God, which predetermined the creation of the New World. That is precisely why Thoreau is a man of “absolute religion”. Emerson’s overall evaluation of Thoreau’s Protestantism here draws most heavily on the etymological and historical premises of New England Puritanism. For Emerson, Thoreau is a man with a spiritual mission; his mission, moreover, apart from being a testimony to his greatness, is the mission of a successor – and the sense of belonging to the great forefathers’ tradition constituted the core of American identity, as Emerson always affirmed. Himself one of the most remarkable authors within New England “mythical mode of cultural continuity”, 60 Emerson incorporated Thoreau in it. Thus, Thoreau’s devoted, pure and holy life, along with his personal achievement, is presented, in Emerson’s eulogy, as one more prophecy fulfilled. Thoreau’s absolute religion contains the high nonconformity of his forefathers – their liberated spirituality, charged with creative energy, whose renaissance, Emerson believed, would bring the awareness of America’s uniqueness. “Thoreau” was “a born protestant”, because he was the proud heir of the New England Puritan Pilgrims, Emerson claims. Thus, Emerson believed that “no truer American existed than Thoreau” – not because Thoreau represented a beginning in any sense free from history, but, on the contrary, because he was the sublime emanation of an equally sublime beginning of all beginnings. Whereas “The American Scholar” may invite questions as to how American Emerson’s scholar really was,61 “Thoreau” admits no such doubts. In Emerson’s eyes, Thoreau is an absolute American, just as he is a man of absolute religion. The two, in fact, coincide since Thoreau’s 59

Ibid., 355-56. Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 143. 61 See Buell, Emerson, 43-58. 60

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American self-creed is presented by Emerson as a religious absolute. “His preference of his country and condition was genuine”, Emerson asserts and, unsurprisingly, attributes to Thoreau’s Puritan nonconformity another traditional New England characteristic – the tendency to draw comparisons between the two sides of the Atlantic: His aversion from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt .… The men were all imitating each other, and on a small mould. Why can they not live as far apart as possible, and each be man by himself?

This last question may be taken as a paraphrase from Thoreau’s essay on Carlyle or from “Walking”; but it also sounds similar to what Emerson himself had written in “The Poet”, “Self-Reliance” and Nature. Both Thoreau and Emerson believed that America’s identity would come to its own not only when it successfully distinguished itself from, but when it directly opposed itself to, everything European, and most importantly, in becoming aware in the process of its own advantages. (The complex manner in which the thought and the writing of these two great American authors were affected by transatlantic influences is a vast subject in its own right.) Emerson willingly adds another quotation from Thoreau: ‘In every part of Great Britain’, he [Thoreau] wrote in his diary, ‘are discovered traces of the Romans .… But New England, at least, is not based on any Roman ruins. We have not to lay the foundations of our houses on the ashes of a former civilization.’62

This is the only passage in which Emerson erases his carefully observed distance from the image of Thoreau in the eulogy. Having himself written against all European “courtly muses” and “retrospections”, appealing, instead, for the perspectives opened up by America, Emerson presents Thoreau as a co-thinker of equal, even superior, standing, as the “true American”. Rather than evaluate him, then, from a higher position, he places both Thoreau and himself as two equals within the great community of the American “Over-Soul”. And perhaps precisely when emphasizing the need for constructing America’s cultural identity in their unique New England Renaissance 62

Emerson, Selected Essays, 346.

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and Romantic-pathetic manner, Emerson and Thoreau can be said to have truly walked together. “It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him”, Emerson observes with admiration: “He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own …. One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great.” 63 For Emerson, the importance of walking, the absolute devotion to America’s nature constituted one of Thoreau’s greatest virtues – it embodied the sublime purified spirit of what was truly American, and before this spirit Emerson submitted abjectly, but also with limitless respect: There was nothing so important to him as his walk …. Mr. Thoreau dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills, and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea.64

In a very Jeffersonian gesture, Emerson measures Thoreau’s greatness in terms of the service he had rendered to his country. Thoreau’s thought, his character, talent and spirit helped America become aware of its own value, by distinguishing it necessarily, and so emphatically and continuously, from its counterparts across the Atlantic. His service to the country, therefore, which Emerson underlines respectfully, is another virtue in Thoreau’s walking – or in walking with Thoreau – among America’s Nature: He resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous studies, making every day some new acquaintance with Nature .… His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was connected with Nature, – and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to be defined by him. He would not offer a memoir of his observations to the Natural History Society.65

Emerson quickly regains the perspective of distance, which he had relinquished for a moment, and focuses on Thoreau’s absolute nonconformity – his independence from any institutions, his inborn 63

Ibid., 351. Ibid., 349. 65 Ibid., 342-52. 64

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Protestantism which so perfectly aligns with Emerson’s own idea of “Self-Reliance”. But there is something else here which itself imposes the distanced point of view. When he broaches the topic of Thoreau’s relationship with Nature, Emerson inevitably becomes more acutely aware of Thoreau’s otherness, his intense perception and sensitivity. The knowledge of their disparity in perceptual ability, at the source of Emerson’s earlier admission on the “sleepy generality” of his thought, naturally fixes Emerson’s viewing position across the distance once and for all chosen by him, predetermining, at the same time, no less naturally, his radical characterization of Thoreau (in contrast to himself, but also to everything else) as someone at the other end of the spectrum: His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard.66

Emerson’s admiration for Thoreau’s extraordinary gift was no doubt sincere, as it must have been throughout the years of their acquaintance: this is the abject admiration for what Emerson wished to possess himself, for what, in Nature, and in general, he wished were more than “the distant line of the horizon”. 67 Thoreau’s sensuous intimacy with nature, his “organic”, as Emerson qualified it, bond with nature augmented (in a markedly personal manner) the initially defined perspectival distance of Emerson’s representative I; as a result, the additional distance begins to imply the danger of real proximity (becoming somewhat personal) and Emerson hurries to overcome the danger, pulling the image of Thoreau back into the range of his chosen point of view. “And yet”, he expressly points out, “none knew better than he [Thoreau] that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind”. Thus Emerson arrives at probably the best known and most often quoted among his observations about Thoreau: “I know not any genius who so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact.”68 This is Emerson’s Emersonian perspective of the eulogy through 66

Ibid., 352. Ibid., 19. 68 Ibid., 353. 67

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which, in all its greatness, emerges Thoreau’s genius. Emerson insists on the word “genius”, implying by it “an extraordinary gift”, but, at the same time, in resonance with the Transcendentalist worldview and ideas, alluding to the word’s etymological meaning of “spirit”. “Thoreau” was “enamored of spiritual beauty”; he had “the source of poetry in his spiritual perception”; he knew “the worth of the Imagination for the uplifting and consolation of human life” and so transformed “every thought into a symbol”; “his presence was poetic” because he thought the fact “of no value, but only the impression”; he had that “wisdom in him … which showed him the material world as a means and symbol”. 69 These phrases clearly contain echoes from Nature and “The American Scholar”, from “The Poet” and “SelfReliance”, “The Over-Soul” and “Representative Men” – all works composed in the course of time along with (and on the basis of) his Journal, whose entries included his thoughts on Thoreau. During their years-long acquaintance, Emerson valued Thoreau most highly, finding in him – in his character, his thought, his behavior – the correlation of his own ideas in their continuous metamorphosis and elaboration. Thus, Emerson must have felt particular satisfaction in his relationship with Thoreau, precisely because of the extraordinary sense of adequacy which his younger friend provided – a sense of adequacy, of parity, of “correspondence” and not of blind imitation, or of any kind of Emersonianism. The proof of this lies in the very text of “Thoreau”: compiled from journal notes recorded over the years, reflecting observations and judgments solidified by the repeated test of time, the essay resounds with the frequent chords of Emerson’s thought but in no way presents Thoreau as a simple echo of its music. Emerson’s respect for Thoreau’s self-reliance was too strong for any such suggestion. Selfreliance was what he valued most in Thoreau, where he found Thoreau’s unique quality of character and thought. And precisely because of his self-reliance, Thoreau was – not a follower – but a genius in Emerson’s eyes – a genius walking with whom was a blessing and a spiritual pleasure. Emerson’s great respect for nonconformity also played a part here: to see Thoreau as an Emersonian would have meant to see him as a conformist, something inadmissible for both of them. So in maintaining his distance, Emerson took the higher position of authority and paternal 69

Ibid., 354.

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condescension towards someone younger than him, but never implied any impersonalizing characterization of Thoreau as a follower. The uniqueness of the individual was of supreme value for Emerson and it would have been against his beliefs to belittle either his own individuality, or that of Thoreau, through such proximity in roles. “I look in vain for the poet whom I describe”, 70 Emerson had written years earlier, and the essay “Thoreau” carries the force of this statement from “The Poet”. Yet, the admission is not as sorrowful as it may appear at first sight: discernible in its background is the sweet consoling murmur of the idea that the poet described shall never leave the pure sphere of the ideal. Later Emerson would note in his Journal that he had “no school and no follower”, feeling this “a boast rather than a lack”. 71 The pride in communicating this “boast” aside, the journal entry unambiguously testifies to Emerson’s independence of mind, which is so vivid and so solidly conceptualized that the independence of others is considered not only with due respect, but as a confirmation of his own. The same idea is found in “Thoreau”: Emerson portrays a figure whose worthiest quality is absolute and radical independence – the fact of being “protestant a outrance”. And “a born protestant”, whose life was full of “renunciations”, could not become a disciple; he could become, however, a co-thinker, a soulmate, a “correspondent”. This is, indeed, how Emerson approaches Thoreau in the essay, through independent correspondences in the course of a joint spiritual walking. In “Thoreau”, Emerson is not looking in vain (since there is no abstract description whose original model never existed in reality). “Thoreau” is neither “The Poet” nor “The American Scholar”, but for Emerson, Thoreau’s spiritual, poetic, personal greatness was commensurate with those great American, and universally human, horizons which lay open before his own gaze. That was why “Thoreau” was “a genius”, and “no truer American existed”. But “Thoreau” is also an oddity, an eccentric, the incorrigible “bachelor of thought and Nature” whose form of behavior invariably – in everything – consisted in stubborn opposition: There was somewhat military in his nature not to be subdued … as if he did not feel himself except in opposition .… It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it. 70 71

Ibid., 221. Emerson, The Journals, XIV, 258.

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Emerson is clearly critical of this aspect of Thoreau’s inborn Protestantism – to such a degree, in fact, that he does not consider it necessary to revise the old journal entry before including it in the eulogy. “This habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections”, he adds (on a clearly personal note), seemingly sharing the judgment he then cites: “‘I love Henry’, said one of his friends”, Emerson quotes, “‘but I cannot like him’”. Thoreau’s continuous opposition was, in Emerson’s view, a sign of immaturity, which, more than the fourteen years difference in age, motivated his patronizing and often reproachful attitude towards the youthful Thoreau. The stately, mature Emerson, known for his serenity and calm, must have felt certain tension in the presence of Thoreau’s unquenchable need to controvert and procure himself “a little sense of victory”.72 Despite all his admiration for Thoreau’s genius, Emerson could not but qualify this habit as “extreme” (infantile) behavior which “mars the conversation”, chills the affections, partakes somewhat too much of the “bachelor” for the taste of the settled family man Emerson. He would have no doubt liked Thoreau better if Thoreau had been less eccentric, more temperate, and respectively – more independent in his behavior. It is worth noting here that while Emerson was complaining in his Journal of Thoreau’s “stubborn and implacable”73 behavior, his continuous opposition for the sake of opposition, Thoreau, in his turn, noted with indignation in his Journal: [Emerson] offered me friendship on such terms that I could not accept it without a sense of degradation. He would not meet me on equal terms, but only be to some extent my patron .... We grieve that we do not love each other.74

The cooling of their friendship obviously permeated the journal entries which were ultimately included in “Thoreau”. But the reasons for this loss of affection are evident too: Thoreau saw his relationship with Emerson as imposed mentorship against which, naturally, he rebelled; Emerson saw in his relationship with Thoreau the immature rebelliousness which, naturally, provoked the mentor in him. Their 72

Emerson, Selected Essays, 344. Emerson, The Journals, XIII, 183. 74 Thoreau, The Journal, VIII, 199. 73

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mutual observations of each other are confirmed by the written record left by people close to both. More importantly, though, both in Emerson and in Thoreau transpires the same desire – the unfulfilled desire for friendship on equal terms. In “Thoreau”, however, the eulogy which was a public speech, becoming subsequently a published essay, Emerson would not linger on the ephemeral aspects of their personal relationship. His representative I swiftly moves to timeless values, accounting for the absence of “a healthy sufficiency of human society” in Thoreau with “the severity of his ideal” 75 – or, with Thoreau’s absolute nonconformity, his religious reverence of truth, the greatness of his inborn Protestantism. Thus, Emerson presents Thoreau’s eccentricity, his intellectual bachelorship, as the positive expression of higher laws. He goes perhaps even further, as Lawrence Buell insightfully suggests: the moral rigor of Thoreau’s behavior, which Emerson could witness with his own eyes, made salient the absence of such uncompromising wholeness of person in himself, so Emerson idealized the socially inadaptable Thoreau as a desired alter ego.76 Precisely Thoreau’s personal and creative wholeness, vindicated, in every aspect of his behavior and spirituality, as the fruitful blessing of independence, elicited Emerson’s greatest respect; since, for Emerson, it embodied the creed of supreme individualism, but, as mentioned earlier, it presented also the sublime rebirth of the Pilgrim Fathers’ spirit of enterprise. Therefore, Emerson’s most serious criticism of Thoreau concerned the failure to fully accomplish his spiritual and creative mission – understood within the terms of the old New England Puritan practical creativity. (In this criticism, Emerson expressed perhaps also his disappointment that his greatest hope in Thoreau was cut short by death.) At the end “Thoreau” Emerson says: Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Pounding beans is good to

75 76

Emerson, Selected Essays, 356. See Buell, Emerson, 301-307.

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The allusions to Walden (the bean field) and to “Civil Disobedience” (the huckleberry party after being freed from prison) are evident. Emerson’s point of view here is extremely superposed: he criticizes the failure to perfect (or to accomplish) the ideal from the position of the ideal itself; he patronizingly reproaches Thoreau for his excessive eccentricity, ultimately leaving us with the representative imperative of the New England idealist Emerson. His positive judgment, however, is given once and for all: Thoreau, the man independent to the extent of being odd, remains for Emerson the truly admired truest American. Emerson’s “Thoreau”, a figure depicted from a very particular perspective in the essay, inevitably poses the question of the real Thoreau. Was he an Emersonian – or, on the contrary, an antiEmersonian? Both conjectures have their critical history and are supported by considerable evidence: the former was favored at the end of the nineteenth century, when Emersonian idealism was popular in America and the continuity between generations was accepted as traditionally unproblematic (precisely when, as mentioned previously, began the reader-receptive biography of Thoreau). The latter reflects a more modern mindset which sees the controversy between moderns and ancients, the rebellion against, and opposition to, one’s predecessors, as obligatory. Yet both of these otherwise conflicting interpretations are limited in their one-sidedness, whereas, as many facts bear witness, Emerson and Thoreau exerted reciprocal influence on each other.78 In fact, although having traditionally invited univocal readings, “Thoreau” attests exactly to the reciprocity between the two thinkers – to Emerson’s fruitful spiritual “correspondence” with the younger Henry David Thoreau. Hence, the final lines of the eulogy suggest the pathos of gratitude, transforming the essay into the apotheosis of immortality: Emerson relates the thought of his friend Thoreau with the Edelweiss, translating, in his illumination, its symbolic meaning as “noble purity”, “everlasting life”. 77 78

Emerson, Selected Essays, 357. See Buell, Emerson, 300-305.

CHAPTER TEN LIFE AS VOCATION The world, – this shadow of the soul, or other me, – lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself.1

The Harmony with the Not-Me: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Two manuscripts mark Henry David Thoreau’s two-year period at Walden: the first, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) came out not long after his return to Concord; the second book, on which he worked for more than eight years, was published. in 1854 under the title Walden; or, Life in the Woods. These were the only two works published in Thoreau’s lifetime. Characteristic of two quite different stages in his spiritual life, his development as a writer, as well as in their reader-reception biography, the books, in fact, complement each other, representing Thoreau’s spiritual universe in its changes over the years. Whereas Walden relates Thoreau’s spiritual history between 1845 and 1854, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers documents his states of mind between 1839 and 1849; taken together, these works form a testimony to Thoreau’s existential artistry in his continuous strive for harmony with the essence, and, both in their overlaps and in their divergences, while outlining his progression to maturity as a writer, constitute, beyond doubt, the most vivid and eloquent record of the American Transcendental experience.2 Unlike Walden, however, which was much revised and had the time to ripen in Thoreau’s mind, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was composed almost in its entirety on the banks of 1 2

Emerson, Selected Essays, 89. See Paul, Repossessing and Renewing, 18.

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Walden, and so is more closely related to the actual spiritual atmosphere of the writer’s life on the pond. In its larger part, A Week reproduces directly Thoreau’s journal entries from the period (which cannot be said with equal certainty about Walden – at the time the book was in its final stages of revision, Thoreau already regarded his Journal as a separate work in its own right). Although as a result Walden unquestionably became the greatest, finest and most mature among Thoreau’s texts, the rawness of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in its resemblance to journal-writing, makes the work incomparably valuable as a first-hand account of the free associative flights of Transcendentalist thinking. A Week is the most “Transcendentalist” among Thoreau’s books, more “Walden-true” than Walden itself. Indeed, it merits attention precisely because it documents, in an unmediated way, with unique richness, the youthfully unencumbered and fulfilling perceptual life of the Transcendentalist Thoreau. I Pages torn from the journal written during Thoreau’s stay at Walden literally, physically, make up the larger part of the manuscript of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; the journal entries are not even used as drafts, but form the text itself.3 The book, in fact, is exactly this – a journal written over the space of a week, from Saturday to Friday. And, just as with a journal, the only logical sequence observed is that of the days of the week. This sequence constitutes the sole structuring device of the book and remains entirely external to its meaning, having neither structural, nor poetic function. The usual succession of days creates the impression of reading a chronicle, the chronicle of a gifted and sensitive mind meditating with nature, as if the Aeolian harp of creative thought is left free to resound with the powerful gusts of inspiration, while day passes into night, and night into day, and the week unfolds its cycle. The tissue of each day complexly weaves together the abundant associations which connect the abstract with the concrete, the general with the singular, the eternal with the ephemeral, forming, thus, the most free-flowing associative work of Thoreau, closest in its execution to the Transcendentalist understanding of creativity as an illuminated, trans-rational process 3

See Harding, A Thoreau Handbook, 54.

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and of writing as a kind of automatic action. A Week is also the work giving appropriate expression to the most fulfilling, truly organic unity with nature which Thoreau ever experienced. In comparison to Walden, whose “Conclusion” rounds up its overall analytical structure and approach, A Week appears rather blurry in outline, brimming over the edges, unfinished almost, and hazy in its genre aspirations. Yet, the “Transcendentalist” nature of the text manifests itself precisely in its haziness: its imperfection as a work of art shows perhaps Thoreau’s immaturity as a writer, but it also represents the most adequate, the “organic” – in Transcendentalist terms – expression of Thoreau’s inspired states of wholeness of being. Thus, A Week can be properly described as “extravagant” in the supremely positive meaning of the word which Thoreau defines in Walden: I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced .... I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments .... The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement .... The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.4

A Week, then, is “not definite”, “without bounds” and in this sense “extra-vagant”, which, despite its susceptibility to criticism, makes it the most ambitious book of the Transcendentalist movement as a whole.5 What is more, Thoreau’s commentary on the extravagance of expression in Walden may be seen as a nostalgic look back at A Week – a harrowing yearning for something lost and a painful effort to gain it back through the already acquired mastery of a personal voice and style. This, in its turn, marks A Week as extremely significant in terms of Thoreau’s sense of creative and personal wholeness: the book represents youth, which Thoreau wishes to preserve forever; but the text is also an exalted hymn to what all Transcendentalists aspired to – the perfect synthesis between the theory of art, the practice of art and a way of life. In its blurry contours, A Week sets out to accomplish a more or less 4 5

Thoreau, Walden, 245-46. See Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 207.

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titanic task, which is to cover practically the entire cultural memory of the human race. (From this point of view, Walden may appear much less “extra-vagant”.) In fact, as far as the book tells a story, it tells of a two-week canoe trip down the Concord and Merrimack rivers, undertaken by Thoreau and his brother John in the early September of 1839. Written years later, by Walden Pond, A Week is thus a memoir, a journey back in time, reviving and immortalizing the bliss of memory. At the same time, A Week is largely taken from Thoreau’s Walden journal, whose experiences become inscribed within the story of the treasured remembrance of the trip; a no less valid claim would be to say that the sacred illuminations of the canoe trip strike a harmonious chord with the spiritual ecstasy of Thoreau’s fulfilling, organic life at Walden. Continually imbuing the past with the feeling of the present and the present with the feeling of the past, in its blending of memoir and journal-writing, A Week seems to dissolve time, not in timelessness, but in a kind of all-time-encompassing duration; the only visible temporal progression in the book remains the sequence of the days of the week, itself endlessly repeatable, infusing the memory of those past days spent with John with the sense of the desire for eternity. The two weeks of the actual journey blend into one everlasting week, perfectly naturally comprising within itself the days at Walden. This transformation of real time to one universal temporal entity appears also in Walden, where the two years Thoreau spent at the pond are brought within the single year of “the higher laws”. In A Week, however, the metamorphosis of concrete time constitutes both a Transcendentalist and a profoundly personal act: Thoreau began writing the book three-and-a-half years after the death of his beloved brother. And just as Emerson, who in 1862 delivered his eulogy for Thoreau beyond personal grief, as a true apotheosis of immortality, Thoreau at Walden in 1845, in his struggle against the actual surge of sorrow, sublimated through grief his memory of happiness, making it even brighter and clearer, something not to be relinquished into the abyss of the past or left to bear the mark of suffering in the present. And in the most harmonious world he was ever able to create, Thoreau integrates the happy harmony of the memory, experiencing it, (re-)living it with the intensity and the fullness of his present: the Walden journal joins its current with that of the memoir, filling the latter with the essence of the present, while dissolving its own “dailiness” within the flow of all time, and not

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simply that of the reawakened personal past. A Week is a book about time: literally, day in and day out, by blending past and present, it passes into an eternity which annihilates also all notion of the future. “The writing of A Week”, H. Daniel Peck observes in this connection, “helped Thoreau ... to understand that, paradoxically, an immersion in the flow of time was necessary to overcome time ... in order to recover from it his own and his region’s past”.6 Composed in memory of John, A Week is precisely a conscious effort on Thoreau’s part to revive the past which was threatening to turn into something irreversibly lost, bereft of bliss in the insurmountable power of grief. Three years earlier, only two months after John’s death, Thoreau had noted in his Journal: How near is yesterday – How far to-morrow! I have seen nails which were driven before I was born. Why do they look old and rusty? – Why does not God make some mistake to show to us that time is a delusion. Why did I invent time but to destroy it?7

Filled with pain and anger, the exclamations here are far from being simply rhetorical questions. They show Thoreau’s intense desire to lose the sense of time, to lose all real index and measurement of time, to “destroy” time and so destroy the fact of his brother’s death. The effort to annihilate time is an expression of Thoreau’s struggle with death. The first person singular form in the last question belies his desire to replace his helplessness as a human being with a kind of personal omnipotence with which to nullify the power of time and its events, erasing the distinction between yesterday and tomorrow. And “today” seems to be non-existent for Thoreau in early 1842; unspoken, “today” resounds in the depths of immeasurable pain. In the summer of 1845, however – at Walden already – “today” becomes the cherished dwelling place of eternity; the present acquires fluidity, able now to incorporate all epochs, including those of one’s own life. “Both place and time were changed”, he writes in Walden, “and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me”. 8 Yet, although precisely in Walden 6

H. Daniel Peck, “‘Further Down the Stream of Time’: Memory and Perspective in Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, Thoreau Quarterly, XVI/3-4 (Summer/Fall 1984), 95. 7 Thoreau, The Journal, I, 392. 8 Thoreau, Walden, 65.

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Thoreau insists that “all these times and places and occasions are now and here”, that “God himself culminates in the present moment”, 9 Walden remains preoccupied with the significance of the place, with the spirit (the spirituality) of the place – hence its toponymic title. A Week, on the other hand, relates the two years living by the pond as an experience specifically concentrated on the dimensions of time. The thorough, harmonious Walden chronotope, in fact, elegantly balances its two experiential centers between the two manuscripts written by the pond: A Week pulls the past into the present, elevating this double current’s blessing into everlastingness, as if transcending all give and take with time; in Walden, however, the question of time begins to appear external, almost as something resolved, so the genius loci takes front stage, whispering the higher laws of its ultimate truths. To achieve the harmony of life and writing at Walden a change was necessary for Thoreau – a change of place and time: the two Walden manuscripts were the result of that change. Published shortly after the Walden experiment, A Week gave expression to Thoreau’s existential and artistic harmony, preserving it as experienced by the pond. However, Walden, which had years to mature in Thoreau’s mind and was much revised (also in this sense, seemingly disconnected from time’s constraints), reflects other, later, changes of place and time as well, and so also other, different harmonies and disharmonies. For this reason, although preoccupied with time, A Week can be seen as even more faithful to the spirit of the place – to the way this spirit was perceived and recreated in writing during the two years of living at Walden. The elegy for John thus was possible for Thoreau only as a hymn to Walden; being by the pond, he did not invent time, he recreated it, not in order to destroy it, but in order to be able to live it, “now and here”. Providing a day to day account of the canoe trip with his brother, at first sight A Week may be taken for the journal written at the time of the journey and not the one kept at Walden. So, in this visibly invisible device too, the book engages with time and time’s layers. But what it achieves, in fact, is the transcendence of all linear – and in this sense, conventional – notions of time. (We might see here yet another sign of Thoreau’s nonconformity – at this point he had already chosen self-reliance, he had chosen to be a nonconformist, which in Transcendentalist/Emersonian terms meant to be Man.) As a result, 9

Ibid., 72.

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although fully devoted to time, A Week proceeds beyond time, or, rather, beyond the conventional measurements of time, creating a kind of trans-time continuously metamorphosing into an all-encompassing moment, a Transcendent reality in an eternal present. From this point of view, the very title of the book explodes a major convention of time from the inside, transforming, in its concrete memory, this one week in Thoreau’s life – through his present life at Walden – into his desired life as a whole. Along the same lines, the loose sequential logic of the narrative and the almost entirely absent balancing between descriptions and philosophical meditations, although partly explicable by Thoreau’s still tentative exploration of stylistic possibilities,10 can be seen as the expressive correlative of a continuous process, a stream of associations not subject to any conventional notions, especially those of time and its measuring units. Although brutally treating the Walden journal, A Week still presents a selection of passages from this journal, thus, in the process of integrating them, destroying the linear sequence of the daily entries and establishing its own unique rhythm. As a result, the day ceases to be important as part of the week, and the week ceases to be a slice of a month or a year; the measurement of time becomes the significant moment. In their intermingling, the significant moments of a harmonious mode of being create the book’s all-encompassing time-flow. The conventional quantitative measurements of time are replaced by qualitative ones. Time becomes a spiritual value. II The opening of A Week is revelatory in this respect. In its introductory chapter, “Concord River”, Thoreau posits the main literary task of the work as a whole – to eternalize the journey, by elevating it, in its every detail, to the status of mythology. Setting out from what is immediately perceptible to the senses, the chapter gradually passes into the realm of mythology: Concord River, with its surrounding trees, bushes and fields, along with the actual river becomes also the river of time, a symbol of movement, of destiny and even death; like nature itself, the river can be “pleasant”, “exciting”, “gentle”, but also 10

See Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 206.

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“dark and sober”.11 In its ever-flowing continuity, it is both a symbol of nature and a part of it. The river’s name has changed with the succeeding civilizations inhabiting its banks, but it “winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw”, as ancient as the Nile and the Euphrates, the legendary Scamander, the Mississippi and the Ganges.12 So astonishingly calm and quiet are its waters, so tranquil its flow, that it seems to move in circles rather than inexorably forward. A proposition had been made, Thoreau notes, for the town of Concord’s coat of arms to depict a verdant field, circled round nine times by the river.13 And just as the river itself, the imagination of the narrator seems to circle round and round, back and forth between the layers of a past constantly projected into the present: the past of Thoreau’s own life, that of his region (the cited early seventeenthcentury descriptions of Concord and its surroundings), of shared cultural heritage, even of the first human civilizations. As a result, the journey with John seems to acquire itself the shape of a circle, by becoming part of the archetypal circularity of a week which encompasses all time and, with time, also the repetitive cycle of nature’s renewal:14 “I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made ... and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.”15 With these words, the introduction to A Week ends. The current of the journey’s days begins, while the author’s thought continues in the direction originally designated – “whither it would bear me”, unrestraint, beyond the limits of space and time, along the Transcendental free-flow of limitless associations – or, “extravagantly”, in the full sense of the word; and thus until the space-time circle comes to its close, the journey ends at its starting point – physical time is dissolved in a week of spiritual eternity against which death is powerless. 11

Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, New York: The Library of America, 1985, 8-9. 12 Ibid., 9-10. 13 Ibid., 12. 14 See Joyce Holland, “Pattern and Meaning in Thoreau’s A Week”, Emerson Society Quarterly, L/Suppl. 1 (1968), 48-55. 15 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 12.

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“At length, on Saturday, the last day of August, 1839, we two, brothers, and natives of Concord, weighed anchor in this river port; for Concord, too, lies under the sun, a port of entry and departure for the bodies as well as the souls of men.” 16 Having transformed Concord River into a symbol of all earthly travel, in its very opening lines, the chapter “Saturday”, the second introduction to the book of sorts, posits the journey’s movement between concretely visible and mythological dimensions of narrative: Henry and John bid a ritual “adieu to [the] familiar outlines” of Concord’s hills, setting out towards “new scenes and adventures”, where “naught was familiar but the heavens”. 17 What follows is a series of descriptions of natural scenes, which pass in succession before the eyes of the two brothers: the vegetation on the river’s banks, and especially, the fish in its water. Although Thoreau “also uses ichthyology for metaphorical purposes”18 – the sunfish, for instance, is a “jewel of the river”,19 the shiner is an infant, the horned pout squeaks like a minister20 – here, more than anywhere else in the book, he brings forth his “scientific side”, his interest in and knowledge of natural history.21 This fact suggests at least two interpretations: “Saturday” points to the direction which Thoreau’s thinking would take over the years and in the same time the chapter transmits the lightness of Thoreau’s thorough and fulfilling sense of self, ensured by his harmonious coexistence with nature. “It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature, to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes”,22 he observes. And precisely with such sense of “security and serenity”, taken from nature and absorbed in his writing (as if in defiance to that “still” which has sneaked into the second part of the sentence), Thoreau describes the fish, both those he sees from the boat and those which he knows to be swimming elsewhere in the waters of the Concord, providing meanwhile the Latin names of the species and their biological characteristics, but – above all – sharing his own fishing experience. Thus, in a very natural manner, almost as if “in accordance with nature”, the figure of the fisherman emerges in 16

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 20. 18 Paul, The Shores of America, 214. 19 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 24. 20 Ibid., 23-28. 21 Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 211. 22 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 23. 17

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the narrative, fastening together – through Thoreau’s complex thought process – the metaphorical layers of the entire chapter: Thoreau (or the speaker in “Saturday”) identifies himself metaphorically as a fisherman. This identification is motivated by Thoreau’s life-choice: fishing is “not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world”. 23 (From his temple in nature by Walden Pond, Thoreau could see the past journey on the river as the harbinger of his great “withdrawal from the world”, which was now lending its life force to the narrated memory of the trip.) In fact, fishing, that pleasure of his “earliest youth”,24 serves as one of Thoreau’s numerous metaphors for life’s vocation: that is why, the two brother-travelers are fishermen, and their journey a fishing expedition with no beginning and no end, representing the endlessness of movement and of time itself. (Years later, this unending journey fishing would metamorphose into the sublime “profession” of the spiritually awake – “walking”.) In A Week, fishing is defined as “a contemplative man’s recreation”, while “science is only a more contemplative man’s recreation”. 25 Significantly, for Thoreau “science” (understood as comprehensive knowledge of nature) is a higher form of the same life-and-art vocation which is “fishing”. As if driven by the harmonious unity with nature underlying the text, A Week prefigures the scientific course Thoreau’s thinking would take later. The book, of course, could not foresee the tormented yearning for the once perfect harmony with the natural world; being the expression of that perfect harmony, A Week exalts in the ascension of a personal and Transcendentalist, natural and scientific wholeness. “Saturday”, however, does not end as an apotheosis of science, but depicts yet another submersion within a mythological eternal present: the riverside landscape appears to the brothers as “a place for fawns and satyrs”, where they ritualistically drink water in order “to propitiate the river gods”26 and so, continue their journey down the circle of time. “It was a quiet Sunday morning, with more of the auroral rosy and white than of the yellow light in it, as if it dated from earlier than the 23

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 24. 25 Ibid., 22. 26 Ibid., 33. 24

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fall of man, and still preserved a heathenish integrity.”27 The chapter “Sunday” is focused mainly on the blessedness of beginnings – including those of New England. In this part of the book, for the first time Thoreau sings his hymn to the “howling wilderness” as seen by the Pilgrim fathers upon their landing in the New World; although he acknowledges the advantages of both the “era of the cultivators” and that of the hunters, emotionally he sides with the hunter (the Indian), because, as he notes, “there is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness”. 28 On the quiet, calm day for contemplation, Sunday, Thoreau broaches the fundamental themes which would permanently preoccupy his mind, incorporating over the years increasingly complex and intricate questionings, and receiving more and more radical – and radically expressed – solutions. But even at the time of writing A Week, Thoreau had visibly formed his notions and conceptual oppositions, asserting, for instance, without the shadow of a doubt: “We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement …. If we could listen but for an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his savageness for civilization.” 29 His contemplation on timeless, “true civilization” – as opposed to the ephemeral, false civilization, which only puts our senses to sleep – naturally leads him to the truth of poetry, seen here as “a natural fruit”. Wisdom, religion – ultimately, Poetry – all blend in the perfect oneness of nature, where, Thoreau believes, lies the source of man’s true creativity: “As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem.”30 The poet, therefore, “should be vigorous as a sugar-maple”, like the god Pan himself, speaking “as if nature spoke” herself.31Thoreau’s meditation brings him to the consciousness of his own wording, which he identifies as the Poet-Traveler’s speech, flowing with the current of the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, absorbing in its course the meandering of their waters, over whose surface the two brothers float in their canoe, continuing their journey to the eternal calm of the beginning of all beginnings: this is the wording-as-journeying to that 27

Ibid., 36. Ibid., 45. 29 Ibid., 46-47. 30 Ibid., 74. 31 Ibid., 75. 28

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sanctuary at the source of all, where time has no power over men and life-as-art (artlessness) pulsates with nature’s cycle of renewal. And in mentioning the sugar-maple’s “vigor”, Thoreau not only creates a beautiful comparison with a moral message, but also makes a personal wish, at the same time declaring the way he self-identifies as a poet. Thoreau wishes to uphold the memory, resurrecting his dead brother within the everlasting moment of the present; along with that, he recognizes himself as a poet at one with nature, as nature’s speaker. Thoreau here is the most harmonious Thoreau ever, experiencing truly the world as “the shadow of his soul”, as this “other me” which leads him to self-knowledge (Emerson); perhaps he even experiences himself as nature’s other Me. Precisely in this state of illuminated wholeness, of somehow preserved “heathenish integrity”, Thoreau’s own thoughts begin to appear to him “the result of a celestial influence”, 32 so his contemplative calm naturally defies any idea of practical activity for its own sake. “Monday”, the day for action after Sunday’s rest, whose chapter opens with passages from Robin Hood ballads and continues with references to the Indian wars, quickly abandons the spirit of adventure, concentrating, instead, mainly on the ethos of the East and the West. In this part of A Week, Thoreau erects another opposition, to occupy permanently a place in his thought – the opposition between the Oriental state of mind, as an intellectual and contemplative predisposition, and the Western or Christian state of mind, which is moralist and active. His sympathies and criticisms accordingly take sides. Nevertheless, Thoreau sees both tendencies, struggling against each other, in all nations and in all men (including himself). In consonance with the river journey’s mood and even more so with Walden’s luminous atmosphere, he concludes: “a man’s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant.”33 This spiritual, but also real-life revelation, “put to practice” in his memory of the journey, is motivated by the proximity of Walden shores. The traveler and the poet thus blend in their sublime artistic life-vocation and Thoreau, illuminated, reaches perfection in his active contemplation: “I see, smell, taste, hear, feel, that everlasting Something to which we are allied, at once our maker, 32 33

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 107.

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our abode, our destiny, our very Selves.”34 His harmony with the NotMe is here at its most complete. The journey down the river continues further, adding to this harmony of oneness scenes, stories from the past of the region, passages on cultural and geographical particularities. The canoe now goes down the Merrimack, whose misty fogs, in their turn, inspire the mind to reach at transcendence. The distant beat of a drum, cutting through the fog, sounds in the late Monday evening like “the universal laws promulgated”, while the almost indiscernible buzz of the telegraphic cables shapes into tender music, as if an Aeolian harp, transmitting a “message sent not by men, but by gods”. 35 The fog, thick all through the night, unlocks spiritual revelations also in “Tuesday”, the day whose morning meditation passes over into the remembrance of climbing the mist-covered mount Greylock: As the light increased I discovered around me an ocean of mist, which … shut out every vestige of the earth, while I was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world … in cloudland .… As the light in the east steadily increased, it revealed to me more clearly the new world into which I had risen in the night, the new terra firma perchance of my future life.

Possessed, as if, by the “pioneer vitality” and faith of his New England forefathers, Thoreau sees “a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise”, and having reached this “undulating country of clouds”, he is filled with hope that “by successive days’ journeys [he] might reach the region of eternal days”.36 The direction of these days’ journeys is also designated: it is the same direction which kept its enchanting attraction for Thoreau throughout his life – South-West. Thoreau’s Transcendental experiences in the foggy Monday evening and Tuesday morning contain the first uses of many metaphors which later in his work would become key ones. Among these are the drum beat as the pulse of the universe, the divine music of the telegraph, the old Puritan American dream of a New Jerusalem, “walking” as the actively maintained unity with the Not-Me, the magnetic attraction of the West as the direction of the future. (This is 34

Ibid., 140. Ibid., 142-43. 36 Ibid., 153. 35

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the reason why critics and scholars have traditionally devoted more attention to the chapter “Tuesday” than to any other part of A Week.37) Although after A Week Thoreau would be most strongly attracted by the spirit of place (and by “walking” exclusively as “sauntering”), here he is still, tenaciously, struggling to settle all accounts with time, to neutralize it, on all levels, into an all-encompassing moment. The Holy Land in “Walking” is foreshadowed in “the region of eternal days” in “Tuesday”. The fact that the Transcendental experience of climbing the cloud-covered mountain in reality took place two years after the river journey with John, but is nevertheless included in A Week, bears no relation to the book and its treatment of the notion of time; but this fact serves to reveal Thoreau’s psychological state then and there at Walden, when he was writing in order to disarm time, filling his sense of the present with illuminated memories whose real date was absolutely of no interest to him. In this state, Thoreau effortlessly crosses over into the eternal day of an eternal theme: love. Love for Thoreau was brotherly love, which in the highest and most sacred sense of the word equaled friendship. “Wednesday” is entirely devoted to that supreme among all themes which, in fact, stands at the source of A Week as a whole. The book was written in memory of John, as an inner journey towards the ideal values of human communication, over which death had no power. Thoreau’s idea of true friendship is absolutely clear. It is a spiritual relationship in which both parties are exigent to excess; friendship “takes place on a level higher than the actual characters of the parties”, 38 thus elevating us above our quotidian concerns and freeing us from their inevitable violence over our spirit. It is that perfect love for the other which ennobles our own person to perfection. The ideal world of such friendship is inviolable – it belongs to the brightest of dreams, and when it takes shape and ends, despite all, into the real world, its sanctuary becomes memory – the memory of the once lived harmony. Although a generalization, the following words of Thoreau carry the force of a personal confession:

37

See Paul, The Shores of America, 220-225; Jonathan Bishop, “The Experience of the Sacred in Thoreau’s Week”, ELH, 33 (1966), 73-76. 38 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 221.

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My Friend is not of some other race or family of men, but flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. He is my real brother.39

The bond between friends is natural, of the order of the natural world, bearing the truth of the essence and, like the essence, immortal. That is why “my Friend shall forever be my Friend”, as surely as “the manifold influences of nature survive during the term of our natural life”. Thoreau’s experience of oneness with nature at Walden, therefore, provides the only means of reviving memory, of truly living within it: “As I love nature, as I love singing birds, and gleaming stubble, and flowing rivers, and morning and evening, and summer and winter, I love thee, my Friend.”40 The illuminated harmony with the Not-Me predetermines here the serene harmony of the reviving memory – true friendship gathers within itself the unfaltering selfrenewing power of nature, takes on nature’s constancy and everlastingness, and so the supreme unity with the Not-Me becomes also the supreme unity with the other Me of the friend. And that sublimity is the experience of transcendence, because “our truest life is when we are in dreams awake”.41 Thoreau at this point has already realized that therein lay his true journey. The actual physical journey begins to appear to him less tempting in comparison with the journey into depth which needs no geographical space. For, “go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us”, he observes in “Thursday”, convinced in the advantages of building “a log-house with the bark on where he [man] is, fronting IT”.42 The resonance with the wholeness of truth experienced at Walden is evident. Thoreau is now prepared “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”, 43 not so much because it is Thursday already and the week is nearly finished, but above all because, in his newly gained harmony of life, which, from the retrospective of Walden, bears no longer relation to the actual river journey, the canoe trip on the Concord and Merrimack naturally and expectedly approaches its destination. All Thoreau needs to do is change direction, and so bring the time-space circle to a close. “Friday”, therefore, becomes the voyage back of which Thoreau 39

Ibid., 231. Ibid., 232. 41 Ibid., 242. 42 Ibid., 248-49. 43 Thoreau, Walden, 67. 40

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actually does not tell much: the return is reduced to the necessary repetition of geographical names, against whose background the ecstasy of self-recognition through and within nature continues to emanate. “We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life”, Thoreau affirms: Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become …. The ears were made … to hear celestial sounds. The eyes were made … to behold beauty now invisible. May we not see God? 44

Thoreau’s answer to this question is more than simply positive: we may, if we lead a naturalized life, not simply life in accordance with nature, but at one with nature. This naturalized life amounts to blending with eternity, with immortality, with everlasting life, with Silence. And “Silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places”, “she is when we hear inwardly”.45In the illumination of such Silence, the brothers’ canoe quietly enters the port of Concord, where they attach it to the wild apple-tree “whose stem still bore the mark which its chain had worn in the chafing of the spring freshets”.46 The time-space circle is thus closed, but now contains the endless repetition of movement and the cosmic music of inner hearing; beginning and end, present and remembered past overlap, making meaningless any notion of time’s forward flow or irreversibility; time flows into the lapse of the river’s current, rising again and again with the swell of spring’s freshets. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers tells the story of a real journey and could be regarded as a travelogue. The book, however, far exceeds the traditional limits of the travelogue genre and cannot really be integrated, even from a purely formal point of view, within the abundant travelogue literature of early and mid-nineteenth century New England.47 More than anything else, A Week is Thoreau’s great Romantic journey within himself, accomplished in the perfect correspondence between inner and outer landscapes, in the tranquil harmony with the world as “this other Me”, with nature as “the 44

Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 310. Ibid., 318. 46 Ibid., 319. 47 See Robert C. Bredeson, “Landscape Description in Nineteenth-Century American Travel Literature”, American Quarterly, 20 (1968), 86-94. 45

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shadow of the soul” (Emerson). And thanks to its limitless allusiveness, so abundant and rich that it overrides the occasional stylistic and conceptual immaturity of the text, this first work by Henry Thoreau stands beyond doubt as the most adequate and most extensive literary expression of American Transcendentalism’s notion of unity between Me and Not-Me. “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself”,48 Thoreau remarks in his Journal with melancholy irony, after hoping vainly for several years that the book would sell. He repeatedly came back to the book, even emending it a few months before his death. This first book fulfilled, throughout his life, a deeply personal need; from it, Thoreau would draw the youthful ecstasy of oneness with the essence, the faith in the possibility of achieving visibility beyond the visible, and (above all, perhaps) the force, in trying to overcome pain, to dissolve time into the static present of eternity. He returned to it repeatedly, until those very last moments, when he was about to discover yet another, different, oneness with the timeless regions of the Not-Me. The Artistic Harmony: Walden I I only ask a clean seat. I will build my lodge on the southern slope of some hill, and take there the life the gods send me. Will it not be employment enough to accept gratefully all that is yielded me between sun and sun?49 The morning and the evening were sweet to me, and I led a life aloof from society of men. I wondered if a mortal had ever known what I knew.50

In the years separating these two journal entries, the first of which looks towards the future, while the second towards the past, Thoreau’s dedication to nature passed through the consequent stages of an idea (a project), which then became reality, and was finally transformed into nostalgic yearning. The transforming of this experience into 48

Thoreau, Selected Journals, 17. Ibid., 2. 50 Ibid., 9. 49

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words, beginning in the period of the Walden experiment (1845-1847) and reflecting afterwards the complex development and the varied states of a high mind on a life-long spiritual and poetic quest, continued up to the very last days before the publication of the book. Walden; or, Life in the Woods came out in August 1854 in Boston, where its reception was quite different from that of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. But even then, when the book was already published, Thoreau did not consider it to be a finished work – his thinking and living with, through, and according to it, never came to an end, and so, in March 1862, a mere two months before his death, he decided to simplify the title to its bare minimum, taking out the subtitle and leaving solely Walden to stand as the name of his acknowledged masterpiece. This change (unfortunately, rarely respected by publishers) amounts to adding another universalizing dimension to the meaning of the book. It shows Thoreau’s unwillingness to inspire followers who could literally reproduce his Walden experiment, but, more importantly, by eliminating all unnecessary details, the title now could emphasize Walden, in its greatness and fullness of meaning, as a “deep and pure symbol”. 51 This final revision did not finalize Walden, but, on the contrary, in yet another respect, made it an open-ended text. “If Walden needed any subtitle, it should have been Life”, Sherman Paul observes in this connection, “and to this end it offered, and continues to offer, not an escape, but the greatest discovery and gift: an open universe, forever novel, alive, and full of life, forever awaiting and sustaining the untried enterprises of men”. 52 Furthermore, this open universe, “forever novel and full of life”, was experienced by Thoreau in truth, while being simultaneously transposed into writing during his two years at Walden – as if affirming, in the untroubled perfect unity between living and writing, that it was possible to make such a deliberate life-choice. In the seven years that followed, however, writing alone took on and continued to sustain this past harmony of living. Thoreau kept experiencing the organic wholeness of his Walden life only through the filigree perfection of his writing, through editing and re-editing, again and again, the pages of Walden, which he continuously dissolved within the pages of his Journal, sublimating their meaning and shape to 51 52

Thoreau, The Journal, III, 232. Paul, Repossessing and Renewing, 16.

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greater clarity, before bringing them back to their original source. Walden is not simply the account of two years of life, ecstasy and joyful harmony with nature by the pond’s shores; more than anything else, Walden is the book which gathered in itself the most critical decade of Thoreau’s life as a thinker and poet, a decade of complex, changeable, willfully plied spiritual history. It is this which makes Walden Thoreau’s greatest book: both in its process of composition and in its finished form, it constitutes the expression – but also the deliberate omission – of the inner struggles accompanying this elevated spiritual and poetic life’s maturity. “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor”,53 Thoreau remarks in Walden, pointing, among other things, to the work’s underlying aspiration. For, unlike A Week, where the words seemed to be floating on the current of the full-blooded life at Walden, Walden itself represents the verbal re-experiencing of that past full-blooded existence, the deliberate effort to put into words the previously felt organic oneness of life and poetry, transforming, at the same time, the fine perfection of words into life itself. In Walden, and thanks to it, writing emerged as Thoreau’s true vocation, becoming, moreover, to the highest degree, a condition for survival. For his Transcendentalist gaze, life and art remained forever blended into one; and in the convoluted, often painful and insoluble labyrinths of his mature thought, their oneness seemed to become even more absolute, art already being the true simplifying, the true deliberate life. In writing Walden over the span of a decade, Thoreau achieved that literary mastery thanks to which he could re-live, again and again, deliberately, in the full sense of the word, his experience at the pond. In the deep and pure symbolism of Walden, Thoreau dissolved completely all the remaining dregs of doubts, which, unwanted, muddied his gaze after the Walden years, and strove to regain the crystal clarity of his vision. The book recounts the Walden life experiment, but it also amounts to living, by “a conscious endeavor”, through the text itself. Both in terms of being and in terms of poetry, Walden is Thoreau’s subjective corrective – his nostalgically cherished, poetic-Transcendentalist, organically connected with nature “objective correlative”. 53

Thoreau, Walden, 67.

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Noting in his Journal that “the best of art is artlessness”,54 Thoreau effectively encapsulated the Transcendentalist idea that true art and truth overlap; but he also implied that artlessness could be understood as extreme simplification, or perfect simplicity, and that, respectively, artfulness was an unnecessary, even baleful in its effects on both life and art, complication, a frittering away by insignificant details, or losing one’s concentration on the essences of things. Walden echoes the idea: An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers …. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand …. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.55

Thoreau’s appeal in these words is addressed to himself also: whereas the two years spent at Walden were an initiation into the sacred simplicity of life, the following years of writing Walden were an initiation into the sacred artlessness of art – into that perfect “simplicity” in the writer’s mastery of language, which removed “the thousand-and-one items” of biography from one’s life-story and transformed it into an autobiography. And autobiography, according to Thoreau, as mentioned more than once above, was the only thing worth creating – in life, in art, in life-as-art and art-as-life. “I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life”,56 Thoreau declares on the very first page of Walden, and the book, obviously, aims to give precisely such an account. A little further in the text, Thoreau clarifies his meaning, expanding on his requirement of narrative simplicity: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost.” 57 The proposed writing – the writing which is implicitly suggested in the opposition, in the omitted “but I do propose to write…”, consciously clothed in a 54

Thoreau, The Journal, I, 153. Thoreau, Walden, 68. 56 Ibid., 1. 57 Ibid., 62. 55

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metaphor detached (and detaching) from any notion of wording – seems to be a kind of non-writing, something different, incomparably greater than writing; as if writing is only fit for odes of dejection (after Coleridge’s manner), whereas ecstasy, piercingly clear and bright, is to be bragged, sung with full vocal force. Years before Walden, Thoreau claimed only the illuminated moments of life to be worth communicating, only the revelations and the states of sublime joy: with his advancing age and maturity, his choice, even firmer, determined the omission from his writing of increasingly frequent states of dejection. No, he would not write an ode to dejection, Thoreau affirmed in Walden, maintaining his youthful conviction, but now with much more conscious effort and difficulty than in his earlier Journal and A Week. That is why the contrast in this proposition is so extreme: not writing his own ode to dejection, an intention declared with absolute resolve, seems to be meant to erase, to destroy completely the state which its writing would have articulated; while the true writing of ecstasy, of Walden, is metaphorically presented as the rooster’s morning song, filled with clear, pure life – this is writing elevated to the fulfilling simplicity of deliberate life. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately” 58 seems to resound with some unwritten panegyric to the power of words, whose beginning could have been phrased thus: “I was writing Walden because I wished to live deliberately ….” For Thoreau, the artlessness of art did not amount to a rejection of complex stylistic devices or rhetorical tropes (mainly because the very structuring principle of Transcendentalist thought, hence also of its linguistic expression, was the metaphor). It referred to that pure perfection in the shaping of verbal material which, elevating life, blended with it, crystallizing its essence to the same purity of perfection. In this sense, the artlessness of art represented another manifestation of the Transcendentalist ideal of synthesis between life and art: it signified the sacred simplicity, the purified sacrosanct core of the ideal, which Thoreau perceived, with increasing intensity over the years, and with absolute seriousness, as his personal destiny. The composition of Walden, this ode to anti-dejection, can thus be seen as an extended (most probably deliberately extended in time) example of that “most delicate handling” which the book extols as our only means of preserving – “like the bloom on fruits” – “the finest qualities of our nature”.59 Walden is indeed such “most delicate handling” – of Thoreau’s own finest nature but also of that of others 58 59

Ibid., 67. Ibid., 3.

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(the readers’). For delicacy implies sparing others (as well as oneself) from dejection, from dyspeptic thoughts and uncontrollable emotions, while making possible the sublimation of life’s muddy dregs to crystal clarity, to the perfect simplicity of purified and purifying word-as-life. The writing of Walden became the willful, artistic triumph of Thoreau’s jubilation, the elevation of his life through “conscious endeavor”. As Thoreau noted in the “Conclusion”: I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this score than was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as if it were muddy …. The purity men love is like the mists which envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.60

Walden’s pages are as pure as Walden’s blue ice – through them transpire the azure expanses of a true and truthful life, cleared from all the tow of fog, simplified to the artless style of true poetry. The differences between numerous journal entries and the final text of Walden, as well as the distortion of certain facts of Thoreau’s life, clearly show that the process of simplifying played a significant role in the composition of the book. The firm conviction, optimism and, even, more or less discernible self-satisfaction found in this statement from the last pages of Walden is particularly revealing: I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.61

A journal entry from the same period, however, records something quite different: But why I changed? Why I left the woods? I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished myself back. I do not know any better how I ever came to go there.62

Similar examples exist in abundance: the hero of Walden can drive a 60

Ibid., 246. Ibid., 244. 62 Thoreau, The Journal, III, 214. 61

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nail home with a single blow of the hammer, whereas Thoreau himself left behind a pile of bent nails in his cellar,63 just like the real-life Thoreau; Walden’s protagonist goes to Concord every few days, but it is nowhere mentioned in the book that he visited his home or his parents – he simply visits this or that house, after which he “escapes [back] into the woods”; the real-life Thoreau “bivouacked at Walden”, as his friend and biographer William Ellery Channing observes, 64 while the book’s Thoreau withdraws “within the great ocean of solitude”, in isolation from the world, “as on the prairies”.65 And the Journal testifies yet, convincingly: “I left it [Walden] as unaccountably as I went to it.”66 No further examples are necessary in order to illustrate what is obvious and widely acknowledged: namely, that the reader of Walden perceives Thoreau as more determinate, more skillful, more courageous than he was in reality. But rather than describe these discrepancies, it seems more important to understand the hidden motivations behind them. To simply assign the divergences to literary self-idealization is too facile, and, more importantly, inadequate as an explanation in Thoreau’s case. Given Thoreau’s rigorous moral engagement in everything he ever wrote, any kind of self-idealization would have been unacceptable to him because false. Thoreau solely valued artlessness in art. (The question here concerns Thoreau’s ethical and aesthetic motivations, not their literary outcome.) Although Thoreau was, in all respects, much more than a mere follower of Emerson, he undertook the Walden experiment in order to give concrete meaning to the ideal of self-reliance, to prove its applicability. In this scenario, discarding all unnecessary, burdensome details appears to be perfectly justifiable, because “the higher laws”, freed from the cloak of unimportant biographical vindications, could shine in their naked truth. The ideal itself predetermined certain literary decisions, especially as far as the parts written at Walden are concerned. So Walden’s hero is not a false representation, but an ideally simplified representation of Thoreau, stripped down to the sublime essence of truthful being. Still, during almost half of the years working on 63

See Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, New York: Knopf, 1965, 182. William Ellery Channing, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873, 24. 65 Thoreau, Walden, 98. 66 Thoreau, The Journal, III, 216. 64

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Walden, Thoreau also wrote independently in his Journal; thus the late Journal, which, contrary to Thoreau’s resolve to select only moments of joy, bears witness to his doubt, dejection and confusion, absorbed in itself the obverse of his jubilation and determination, thus simplifying the composition of Walden by assigning to it indeed only those illuminated moments once and for all chosen as worth communicating. The final text of Walden to a large degree owes its shape to the separateness of Thoreau’s journal-writing, as the Journal, apart from everything else, began providing drafts which were no longer used. Walden was Thoreau’s life- and art-work’s clean copy – the crystal clear Walden ice of a life inconceivable without writing. “I learned this, at least, by my experiment”, Thoreau claims in the “Conclusion”, “that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours”.67 The decade-long composition of Walden is the writer’s confident progress towards poetic mastery. Increasingly confident in his writing, Thoreau could regain the high plateaus of his youthful exaltations, transform the ecstasy of his previous life in harmony with nature into the perfectly wielded, confident harmony of poetic style. Moreover, the confidence in the harmony of his written style counterbalanced the lack of assurance in the quotidian, so, for Thoreau, holding onto his confidence as a writer became imperative, it became a matter of continuous and conscious effort to simplify life, disengage it from everything insignificant and unwanted, in order to reach the settled, calm, balanced and balancing beauty of art. (That explains, in fact, the ease with which the reader identifies with the luminous, clarified universe in Thoreau’s Walden.) Thoreau’s conscious effort towards such elevating harmony is visible on every level in Walden – in the determined, confident tone of the writing, sustained from beginning to end, in the particular sequence of chapters, in the ordering of the seasons culminating in the apotheosis of life’s reawakening in “Spring”. Just like Thoreau’s cabin by the pond, Walden is a conscientiously built solid construction.68 At its foundation lies the yearly cycle as a major structuring device: in March, Walden’s hero cuts the pine trees on his chosen lot of land and 67

Thoreau, Walden, 245. See Walter Harding, “Introduction” to The Variorum Walden / Henry David Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding, New York: Washington Square Press, 1963, xv. 68

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by the end of spring, he builds his house; in the beginning of July, he moves in, and during the summer tends to his bean field; in the autumn, he sets up his fireplace to heat the cabin; in the winter, he watches every living and inanimate thing in his surroundings; and in the following spring, with the thawing of the pond’s ice and the general awakening of life, the book arrives at its natural end. Thoreau reduces, simplifies, the two years of the actual experiment at Walden to one year, in a universalizing gesture which transforms the passage of time into an all-encompassing flow, into a universally valid and universally significant unit of time transcending time itself. (And although Walden does not tackle directly the problem of time, as this problem had already been resolved in A Week, the comprehensiveness of the present moment, of the infinitely repeatable year, adds to the power of the spirit of the place, turning Walden into an emblematic here and now.) More importantly, however, Walden’s cycle revolves between two springs – the spring at the beginning of the book and the spring at the end provide circular closure to the composition, enunciating the triumphant perpetuity of life and its eternal renewal. The idea of wholeness in Walden is embodied in its unambiguous compositional structure. Additionally, the different chapters are so organized in their sequence as to complement and balance each other, creating the different sublevels of compositional harmony. The themes of the spiritual and the earthbound, for instance, form a balanced paired sequence (“Higher Laws” and “Brute Neighbors”), and so do those of the practical and the philosophical (“Economy” and “Where I Lived, & What I Lived for”), as well as the anthropocentric and the zoocentric (“Former Inhabitants; & Winter Visitors” and “Winter Animals”). The other chapters also form contrasted pairs – “Solitude” and “Visitors”, “The Pond in Winter” and “Spring”, “Reading” and “Sounds”. The most representatively Transcendentalist chapter, “Higher Laws”, is placed at the absolute center of the book, in perfect symmetry in relation to the beginning, “Economy”, and to the end, “Conclusion”. Each chapter in itself is constructed with careful precision, down to the smallest detail, while the different paragraphs, most of which are unusually long and so rounded and complete that they can be regarded as small essays in themselves, 69 follow the 69 See Little Essays from the Works of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Charles R. Murphy, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

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upward movement of the text towards its culminating finale.70 In examining Walden as a literary construct, from whichever perspective, the artifact’s ideal harmony is clearly visible: Walden’s ice-clear verbal refinement has, as if, taken on the marble perfection of ancient Greek sculpture, the only difference being lodged in the conscious endeavor acting as a compensatory balancing mechanism, which predefines and guarantees the confidence of Thoreau’s lines and clear proportions. As Laura D. Walls observes, “the achievement of Walden, both in the living and in the writing, was willfully made: against its serene and effortless tone and wide-margined days runs the cross-grained writer who hammered out every sentence, defied the traditions of his village, and forced the earth to ‘beans instead of grass’”.71 “There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection”, Walden recounts, providing a possible perspective on its own author and composition. “One day it came into his mind to make a staff .…” And the staff had to attain perfection in every respect: His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him …. When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions .… The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?72

The parable can be meaningfully applied to Walden, both to its process of writing and to the book as a finished work. But the fable does not necessarily amount to a self-reflecting commentary on the part of Thoreau: it provides, rather, another expression to the Transcendentalist ideal of the trans-temporal higher laws of life-as-art. What is interesting and revealing in the story is that it contains a non70

See Harding, “Introduction”, xxii. Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and NineteenthCentury Natural Science, Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, 158. 72 Thoreau, Walden, 247. 71

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allegorical part, which is Thoreau’s true commentary on art’s perfection – Thoreau directly claims that art is a system of fair proportions, an ideal order, and moreover, an order created with resolution and faith. This exactly is the aesthetic creed of Walden, its pure (completely purified, simplified) art. At the same time, since the Transcendentalist notion of aesthetics is inseparable from its ethical dimensions, Walden’s aesthetic creed is also its moral creed. For, the perfect result, the true artifact, can be achieved, according to Thoreau, only through the combination of pure art and an equally pure material, in the pure correspondence between the two. Walden draws abundantly on the pure material of the life by the pond, sculpting out of it “a world with full and fair proportions”. And this decade-long artist’s laboring over poetic harmony, conducted with resolution and faith, itself becomes life, Thoreau’s great life as a writer. Here, however, arises a logical question: how does Walden, this verbal edifice of precise proportions, integrate its harmoniousness with the idea of extravagance, or the idea of writing without bounds? “I fear chiefly”, Thoreau observes in the “Conclusion” (quoted earlier in another connection), “lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced”. 73 At first sight, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, with its blurred, indistinct outlines, with its free associations following the unpredictable lapse of Transcendentalist ecstasy, fits the notion of extravagance better than the finished, finely sculpted Walden. Also, the fear Thoreau expresses at the end of Walden, beyond doubt, contains a note of nostalgic desire for that past, limitless, Transcendental wholeness experienced and transfused into writing at the time of composing A Week. In its unconscious freedom, simultaneously a praise to and a means of achieving the unconscious in man, which for Thoreau equaled God’s consciousness, A Week seems to be the extravagant unconsciousness, the transconscious limitlessness that Walden cannot be, because Walden is the poetic apotheosis of confidence, of resolution, of positive will – of “conscious endeavor”. And conscious endeavor implies limits, it creates order; it is the highest kind of selectivity. But what are these limits and were they the ones Thoreau feared? The idea of extravagance in Walden does not simply encapsulate his nostalgia for 73

Thoreau, Walden, 245.

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the transcending boundlessness, both in living and in writing, of A Week; more than anything else, extravagance was the name which maturity gave to the aesthetic and poetic alternative to simplifying. Precisely “the narrow limits of my daily existence”, and not any other limits, need to be overcome by extravagant, liberated and liberating expression adequate to truth, which itself is limitless in its universality and its eternity. In this sense, the extravagance of literary expression proves to be both the means of overcoming insufficiency of being, as well as the result of a careful selection and clearing of the material of one’s own daily life, until that material can reach the perfect purity of the illuminated moments found in pure art – the art of artlessness, of the “truth of which I have been convinced”. Thoreau’s “extravagance” in Walden refers to his life, and not to his art, or, rather, in art, in his writing, it was the willful, spiritually elevating limiting of life’s unwanted limits. (Again, Thoreau’s gesture escapes the Romantic mould by being made with utmost seriousness.) Such selectiveness was not necessary during the composition of A Week, because youth does not know “the narrow limits of daily life”; life then was itself pure material, which, with unconscious ease, transformed itself into art. In Walden already it was pure art, in its conscious effort, which created pure material, material simplified to the sublimity of life up to the height of one’s own conceptions. “By conscious means he [Thoreau] could not retrieve the unconsciousness of his youth, that glorious passivity he recalled in Walden, when he spent his life lavishly ‘dreaming awake’, ‘floating over its [the pond’s] surface as the zephyr willed’”, Sherman Paul points out: “This was the personal tragedy that humanized the youth who had had eternity in his eye … but it was also the struggle that the hero tried to hide.”74 Perhaps, better yet, not to hide but to overcome through a new kind of limitless freedom, the freedom of an accomplished poetic style, of a linguistic mastery developed to perfection. For, the writing of Walden became for Thoreau a blessed activity, his extravagant way of maintaining the state of being just awoken, which he needed increasingly over the years, as the yearning for his lost youth was gradually joined by the nostalgia for his life at Walden.

74

Paul, Repossessing and Renewing, 26.

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II Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did …. Morning brings back the heroic ages.75

These representative lines from Walden, along with many others, show how and why Thoreau’s “life in the woods” can be qualified as a “Homeric experiment”.76 Clearly, the heroic spirit and the epic breadth of Homer’s age were close to Thoreau’s mind when he set on his Walden enterprise. Particularly eloquent in this respect, the Walden journal, containing the first nascent version of the book, uses Homeric notions in describing Thoreau’s personal experience. This rhetorical tendency is quite salient, if not dominant: thus, the cabin at Walden is conceived as the “halls of Olympus”77 or “my Ithaca”, while Thoreau sees himself as “a fellow-wanderer and survivor of Ulysses”; the pine tree in front of the cabin’s door is “perfect as [Nature’s] Grecian art”;78 Thoreau is visited by Paphlagonians and Laestrygonians79 and feels as if he is inhabiting the Elysian fields. 80 In Walden, the comparative correlations already form a more complex (and quite eclectic) web of allusions to ancient history and mythology, accompanied by a variety of ritual patterns, from the cyclic movement of the seasons to the daily bathing in the pond.81 The examples are many: moving to the cabin at Walden equals “the removal of the gods of Troy”; Thoreau cutting the weeds around his home is like Achilles slaying Hector; a mosquito’s soft buzz sounds like “Homer’s requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and

75

Thoreau, Walden, 65-66. Seybold, Thoreau: The Quest and the Classics, 48-61. 77 Thoreau, The Journal, I, 361. 78 Ibid., 363. 79 Ibid., 365-66. 80 Ibid., 375. 81 See Reginald Cook, “Ancient Rites at Walden”, in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Walden, ed. Richard Ruland, Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968, 93-100. 76

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wanderings”; 82 the battle of the ants, which Thoreau watches, resembles an encounter between Myrmidons and Trojans, the most fierce ant soldier avenging himself, as if, for Patroclus. 83 Thoreau “kept Homer’s Iliad on [his] table through the summer”, “for what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?” 84 And he found it “no wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket”. 85 The allusion is unambiguous – Thoreau, like Alexander, values Homer’s epic, but perhaps also like Alexander, wanted to feel in himself Achilles’ fearless spirit, no doubt seeing the Walden experiment as comparable to the deeds of ancient Greek heroes and the victorious expeditions of the heroic Macedonian king. To overemphasize the Homeric side of Thoreau’s Walden life would imply reducing the multifaceted nature of his experiment, which carries also the spirit of Confucius, of the Vedas and the Vishnu Purana, the Bhagavat Ghita and the Zendavesta, the Harivansh and the ancient Icelandic Eddas. It would imply, moreover, ignoring the light self-irony in Thoreau’s tone, as well as the overall framework within which this incredibly wide gamut of cultural references functions in Walden: namely, the universalization of individual experience, thanks to Thoreau’s ability, so valued by Emerson, “to infer the universal law from the single fact”.86 But the question here does not concern the book’s universal cultural references, neither the associative richness of Thoreau’s thought in general, but rather, the special significance the allusions to classical antiquity acquire in Walden. For Thoreau and his contemporaries, ancient Greece and Homer stood for Spartan courage, spontaneity, childlike innocence, naturalness and heroism. 87 Just as ancient Greece represented the dawn of human history, in moving to Walden, Thoreau could return to his spiritual beginnings, to his childhood and early youth, to the dawn of his own life. “That is the glory of Greece”, he writes in his Journal, “that we are reminded of her only when in our best estate, our elysian days, when our senses are young and healthy again”. 88 The use of 82

Thoreau, Walden, 66. Ibid., 174-75. 84 Ibid., 75. 85 Ibid., 76. 86 Emerson, The Complete Works, X, 479. 87 See Seybold, Thoreau: The Quest and the Classics, 41. 88 Thoreau, The Journal, III, 319. 83

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“only” here is revelatory. The word bears extraordinary resemblance to that other “only” which singled out the moments of illumination, the only moments worth recording: the adverb here is indeed the same heroic, selective “only” Thoreau would always insist upon. Commensurate to it, and no less indicative is the nostalgic, hopeful “again”, concentrating within itself the yearning for youth, health and fulfillment, for the greatness of one’s own ancient Greece. Walden can no doubt be considered the story of a hero’s attempt to live a heroic life, an attempt, moreover, which met with complete success. Unlike his other books, and especially A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers where the first-person narrator demonstrates a disposition for rather passive contemplation, in Walden Thoreau is the active main protagonist in a plot he devised for himself.89 This plot, the story of a deliberate life in nature, is heroic in that it requires confident self-reliance, conscious endeavor, a change of place and time, a determined life-choice through which to approach “those parts of the universe and … those eras in history” most cherished, and initiate oneself as “a sincere worshipper of Aurora”. 90 Above all, however, the heroism of Thoreau’s story stems from his communion with nature, because, in his own words, “though man’s life is trivial and handselled, Nature is holy and heroic”.91 To have the courage to abandon the town and its daily life, to have the determination to simplify life, disburdening it from all human pettiness, in order to search unity with nature and attain it, appears heroic also because, just as with the ancient epic heroes, the set goal is itself heroic and is pursued till the end. And just like these heroes, Thoreau followed his goal, “holy and heroic Nature”, with absolute seriousness of purpose and dedication. For, Thoreau was experimenting with his own life, and in order to put into deeds the ideal of self-reliance and accomplish this ideal on all possible levels, he could draw health and vigor, like Antaeus touching the earth, only from his complete communion with nature. Emerson’s ideal, in fact, was already a bearer of heroism; from Emerson’s liberating god, from his American Scholar and Poet, emanates courage and indomitable spirit. Thoreau took over the 89 See Joseph Moldenhauer, “Paradox in Walden”, in The Recognition of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Wendell Glick, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969, 351-65. 90 Thoreau, Walden, 65. 91 Thoreau, The Journal, II, 384.

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Promethean fire from Emerson and illuminated with it his own Elysian days at Walden: his titanic Romantic gesture became the gesture of a titan’s life-choice. The way was only one, heroically simplified: “I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself.”92 Being part of nature was precisely what fascinated Thoreau in the ancient Greeks. Throughout his life, with increasing effort, he struggled for the same wholeness of being, of being awake, as if at first dawn, which state Thoreau knew from his own childhood and youth, and brightly associated in his mind with antiquity’s glory, with those “boys in the sunshine”93 who were the heroes of ancient Greece. Rather than “knocking under and going with the stream”, it was incomparably better, according to Thoreau, to do something different: “With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor”, he pleads in Walden, “sail by it [this danger], looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses”.94 And in choosing to live at Walden, Thoreau did precisely that. In this sense above all, his Walden life constituted a Homeric experiment”: Walden gave him the opportunity to “sail” towards the ecstatic wholeness of the Ithaca of his youth, providing for him, at the same time, the Odyssean “mast” to prop him against the threatening inrush of the everyday. Gradually over the years, it was the writing of Walden which completely overtook these functions. During the two years spent at Walden, and even more so in the years to follow, the very process of transmuting personal experience into writing carried a Homeric character for Thoreau: because experience not only acquired value in this process, it also became reality for him only by being commemorated in words, or by being written. Thoreau’s epic reflex to fix the moments of his being is discernible in every sentence; hence the thousands of journal pages, and the years-long sieving through these pages of Walden’s text. Because Thoreau was above all the writer who undertook an experiment with his life; he was not simply an experimenter with life who decided to describe, as best as he could, his experience. Writing formed an organic part of the experiment, without which Thoreau’s Walden life would have been inconceivable, and it was only thanks to writing that the success of the undertaking could continue to bear fruit after Walden. 92

Thoreau, Walden, 97. Thoreau, The Journal, I, 165. 94 Thoreau, Walden, 72. 93

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The Iliad was more than a mere accompaniment to Thoreau’s attempt to blend with nature’s heroism; it is exactly the Iliad, this morning song of humankind, that directs Thoreau’s thought in Walden towards the everlasting essence of words: A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only read but actually breathed from all human lips; – not be represented on canvas or a marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech.95

Thoreau seems to be speaking here from the position of a reader and the passage is from the chapter “Reading”. But his words, in fact, refer both to others’ writing and to his own: that is, Thoreau is speaking as a reader, but perhaps above all as a writer. If these words had been written during his stay at Walden, they would have amounted to a rhetorically powerful, allegorical commentary on the evident – the imperishable value of antiquity’s cultural heritage. But having actually been written in the years after Walden, they seem closer to a hopeful self-reflexive comment, meant to reassure the author himself, as his own written word now carried “the breath of life”, of Thoreau’s life; his writing was already transformed into living speech so “near to his life” that it encompassed it entirely in its holy artlessness. The Walden Homeric experiment allowed Thoreau to regain the harmony with the Not-Me which he had experienced at the time of the Concord and Merrimack journey with John, as well as much earlier, in his early years of childhood, when, as he reminisces in Walden, he had seen the pond for the first time, committing forever its image to memory. The experiment allowed him to relive that blissful state of complete unity with the essence, the perfect syncretism of being which connected him to the ancient Greeks, by giving him the sublime harmony of a new born man (making him “as wise as the day [he] was born”). Later, with the onslaught of nostalgia for Walden, Thoreau’s Homeric experiment continued to unfold but now it focused entirely on the harmony of writing, on the life of the written word. For, just as Thoreau had hoped, the Homeric word’s ability to summon life, 95

Ibid., 76.

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conjure it into being, while immortalizing it, now seemed to inhabit his own writing, giving flesh to the most harmonious part of his experience, the life-bearing (and life-preserving) text of Walden. That is why Walden is an exalted hymn to the absolute triumph of life. Thoreau’s written word, purified over the years to match the clarity of Walden’s waters, becomes the source of stability for Thoreau, the only available Odyssean mast of art as religion, philosophy, self-creed, truth and beauty – the Romantic self-remedy of the poet yearning for his life’s wholeness. Walden is the living speech of its creator in each and every present – because in its poetically perfect Homeric completeness, it has integrated and eternalized the complex incompleteness of Thoreau’s yearning present. III Thoreau and Walden created each other by sculpturing the perfect harmony of a poetic wholeness of being. Thoreau’s connection to the pond was so profound and intimate that, at one moment, watching his own reflection over Walden’s surface, he hopefully exclaims: “Walden, is that you?”96 Walden’s crystal waters cleanse Thoreau’s gaze, and thanks to them his vision attains to the power of Earth’s eye, the all-seeing eye spanning the boundless cosmos. Walden purifies and concentrates Thoreau’s gaze, becoming his vision of a newly born – his fixed viewpoint which alone can ensure the creation of his deliberately beautiful, organically thorough and harmoniously perdurable poetic world. As Laura Dassow Walls felicitously points out: The only recourse in such a universe is to establish and insist on a ‘viewpoint’, for the only way to hold the multifariousness together is to be the poet-self who so heroically mediates between nature and spirit, drawing ‘into the sweetest union’ the wild woods and the civil township, the unspoiled garden and the ravaging engine of progress, history and eternity, narrative and myth. What that self demonstrates is not a universal and suspended truth, nature’s ultimate answer, for there is none. There is only a way of seeing, a mode of vision and following from it a mode of life: no theory, only method.97 96 97

Ibid., 147. Walls, Seeing New Worlds, 159.

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Thoreau transforms the pond into the fixed center around which circle the innumerable elements of his artistic and religious universe. Convinced that there are as many ways of living as there can be drawn radii from one centre, Thoreau insistently affirmed, on all possible levels, that his only center had been determined once and for all. This is one of the reasons for his masterpiece to be entitled simply Walden. Perfectly rounded by God’s hand into Earth’s eye, Walden Pond became Thoreau’s steadfast center, both in living and writing, his transparently-transcendental and nature-awakened gaze. It both ensured and symbolized his being as a seer, in all the different periods of his life. “I am a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all”,98 Emerson wrote in Nature as early as 1836, asserting vision to be the premise of all Transcendentalist aspirations. Thoreau’s self-identification with Walden as the all-seeing earthly eye, which attains to a radically purified visibility beyond the visible, definitely echoes Emerson’s notion; however, not only by translating the idea into concrete, palpable terms, as usual, by connecting it, in this case, with a specific physical reality, but most of all by infusing Emerson’s concept with the warmth of a deeply personal affection. Thoreau’s love for Walden was the love for a living thing, dear to his heart; moreover, the pond was the only thing communicating with which elevated and exalted his self to its most desired, most truthful essence. One does not need to read Thoreau’s Journal in much detail to realize that Walden was his life-long source of inspiration and object of contemplation, or that the first lines of Walden, which announce the author to be “a sojourner in civilized life again”, do not at all signal the end of his sojourn at the pond. Walden continued to give form and flesh to Thoreau’s thinking; it remained his sacred (and safe) spot, from which his thoughts could whirl in centrifugal movement reaching all corners of the universe, only to swoop back to the center looking for a fit expression, thus achieving their poetic and imagistic wholeness. The magnificent ending to the chapter “The Pond in Winter”, in its orchestration of multiple metaphorical layers, beautifully illustrates this circular, Walden-centric process so characteristic of Thoreau’s thinking: I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! There I meet 98

Emerson, Selected Essays, 18.

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Walden is indeed Thoreau’s eye – that exceedingly sharp sense which simultaneously sees and transcends the visible, which fixes the place and the time but, also, transforms them into all-place and all-time, a gaze possible only in the pond’s company, in the felicitous harmony of self-reliance gained through communion with Walden. The fulfillment brought by this communion transforms solitude into sublime illumination which has nothing in common with loneliness. “I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself”, Thoreau observes: What company has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of its waters.100

To withdraw with Walden’s blue angels amounts to being “in the best company”,101 so the very notion of loneliness begins to appear foreign, external, coming from the non-company of human society. And by the pond, Thoreau has his own world, his whole world, with his “own sun and moon and stars”.102 The sun is also alone, Thoreau does not omit to point out, alone with the entire universe around it. It is this sun-like freedom in communicating with the cosmos which the little pond in Massachusetts bestows upon Thoreau. Walden was his viewpoint, the steady center of his gaze and, above all, the center of the identity he had managed to forge in the bliss of his youth and which, from then on, he persistently sought to sustain. That is why Walden was not one possible place for Thoreau but the only place, geographically defined 99

Thoreau, Walden, 225. Ibid., 103. 101 Ibid., 102. 102 Ibid., 98. 100

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and yet encompassing all space, where he could gain the thorough blending of art and life in the unity with nature. Thoreau’s topophilia, therefore, amounted to a profound affection for the pond that went along with a constant need to feel Walden’s physical and spiritual presence. Thoreau’s was not an abstract philosophical engagement with nature, but, more than anything else, real human love which, on a deeply personal level, became the sacred premise of life itself. Because of this love Thoreau often imagines (and feels) Walden to be a living being: the pond is “a hermit”, “a neighbor” and “a brother”, even “a squaw” for Thoreau; it “closes its eye-lids when it freezes”,103 “stretches itself and yawns”,104 dies and is alive again. The personification of the pond is the very expression of Thoreau’s love for it, of his life-defining need to love. (The temptation to seek explanations in compensatory mechanisms will have to be ignored here.) Thoreau’s need to love reaches at times such intensity that he assigns to Walden human individuality, a unique character. Moreover, Thoreau claims: … of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor .… it is itself unchanged .… the same thought is welling up to its surface … it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, it may be to me.105

The company of such a character cannot but lift the spirit, elevate “up to its surface” the “I” most worthy and most desired, which would continue to yearn forevermore for that same blending into one, that same self-recognition in its waters. The question “Walden, is that you?” – addressed to Thoreau’s own face reflected, dissolved into Walden’s image – gently and warmly invites a positive answer. Indeed, Thoreau had profound feelings for Walden – a “tender relation”106 with it, as he would later qualify it in his Journal. “Not only transcendentalist dogma”, Lawrence Buell rightly observes, “but also the felt sense of the pond’s companionableness help make Thoreau’s moral formulations credible”.107 At the basis of the Walden 103

Ibid., 224. Ibid., 227. 105 Ibid., 146-47. 106 Thoreau, The Journal, X, 252. 107 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and 104

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experiment, then, lies also love: Thoreau’s life-preserving need to feel this love found expression in the years-long writing of Walden too. And Walden watched over this love, enveloping it in the secure hold of its poetic harmony. In fact, the moments of direct and explicit poetic self-identification with the pond, such as the passage quoted above, are rare in the book. More often than not, Thoreau’s tender devotion to Walden takes the shape of exalted descriptions or of exceedingly precise observations of natural phenomena – as if the purity and holiness of his affection, too overpowering to be told directly, required constant showing rather than saying. Walden was Thoreau’s sanctuary and it was emotionally important for him to perceive it, think it, live it precisely as a sanctuary.108 For, Walden, both in his two-year experiment and in the decade-long writing of the book, was Thoreau’s Romantic pastoral return to childhood and youth; Walden was his poetic and religious initiation into the Emersonian correspondence between nature and spirit; Walden was his positive experience of a real economic, in a sense agrarian, way of life; Walden was the maturation of his interest in natural history and of his skillful observation of nature; Walden was his true birth as a writer; Walden, finally, was the focal point of his life and art, from whose deep waters only the responding question could emerge: “Henry, is that you?” Hence Thoreau’s need to preserve Walden through his loving care, to ensure, through Walden’s poetic transcendence of time, the pond’s (as well as his own) stability, its invulnerability and inaccessibility. Indeed, in his enduring choice to withdraw in the solitude of the pond, Thoreau, in fact, closes his Walden world to the outside. As a result, “Thoreau’s Walden is exactly the place we cannot be”, Laura Dassow Walls duly observes.109 In fact, Thoreau withdraws just far enough away “to be seen clearly”, Stanley Cavell notes:110 far enough to become a moral paragon for his neighbors (his readers), to universalize his individual experience by making it “representative” (Emerson), thus imbuing it with social significance as well. But this does not mean that Thoreau gives Walden to everyone, so that the Formation of American Culture, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995, 209. 108 See Ibid., 120. 109 Walls, Seeing New Worlds, 160. 110 Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden, New York: Viking, 1972, 11.

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everyone can lead the same kind of life: on the contrary even, Thoreau raises his Walden experience to universal exemplarity, but entirely concentrated on Walden as the center of his own life, he inspires and requires the same responsibility and spiritual concentration upon the place where we ourselves, Concord fellow denizens and readers in general, are living. Thoreau at Walden is not everyman everywhere – Thoreau at Walden is uniquely Thoreau and uniquely at Walden in a world with its own sun and stars, created by the two and only for the two. This world can be seen, and is meant to be seen, as exemplary solely in its perfect harmonious wholeness. (Otherwise it could not serve as a model.) And this world exists by virtue of its being untouchable: it allows no disharmonies of any kind, neither those of Thoreau’s own inner state in the years following the Walden experiment, nor those which might have invaded it from the permanently unfinished outside world. Its harmoniousness issues from its absolute purification, from its extreme simplification. In its selfsufficiency, this world rejects as unnecessary, even as threatening, any interference. And protects itself: Thoreau watches, without respite, over his pure Walden universe, which has no room for others. Thus, Walden is not simply the only place for Thoreau; it is also the place only for Thoreau, a world not to be shared either metaphorically or, even less so, literally. In its perfect poetic wholeness, it is a world parallel to the world of others, with no point of contact with the latter, but, at the same time, placed at a visible distance in order to serve as example. Moreover, this distance is safe – first, it was physically guaranteed by Thoreau changing place and time, thus avoiding any interference, while later it was the very composition of Walden which allowed no distractions from the sanctuary of the pond. Both during the experiment and during the years of writing Walden, Thoreau created and preserved his Walden world through the conscious endeavor of simplification, through disburdening it from the world of others – through his withdrawal not so much by Walden Pond as with it, in its felicitous company. Walden pursues the parallel nature of this world, maintaining the high standards of its possible, but not actual, overlap with the outside. Walden does not share, does not divide its world with anyone, but presents it in its entirety, in its finished, perfect (and perfectly sculpted) wholeness, so that “it may do good service to him whom it

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fits”.111 The size may be (has to be) the same, but the coat is one’s own and not for rent: Thoreau is inconceivable without Walden (Walden), just as Walden without Thoreau would not be Walden but any other pond. Their common world is unique and Thoreau watched over its harmony in an effort which was life-saving for him. Walden is Thoreau’s spiritual autobiography, but, above all, to paraphrase Sacvan Bercovitch, Walden is Thoreau’s auto-spiritual biography,112 and it could not but protect the sanctuary which made it possible. How does Thoreau, in fact, protect his relic? How does Walden preserve the invulnerability of its sacred place? And what is the outside threat hanging over Walden and calling for Walden’s aid? Nostalgically traveling back to his early childhood, Thoreau reminisces: When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its coves grape vines had run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for some kind of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake .… But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?113

This passage from Walden is particularly revealing, because it depicts the idyll of nature being broken and the lament comes unexpectedly, without any transition; what is more, it is not followed by any further mention of the devastation of Walden woods. However, the deforestation was already a fact and the laying bare of Concord’s vicinity had reached unprecedented dimensions during Thoreau’s time.114 Thoreau’s reserve on the subject can hardly be explained by 111

Thoreau, Walden, 2. See Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins, 136. 113 Thoreau, Walden, 145-46. 114 See W. Barksdale Maynard, Walden Pond: A History, New York: Oxford 112

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the fact that it was a common topic, well-known to his contemporary readers, who were, by the way, in Thoreau’s eyes, always his fellow Concord residents first. On the contrary, Thoreau could have omitted the topic easily if it had been less painful to him; but he purposefully let it enter (or rather, let it slip into) Walden, in order to express his discontent, yet even more so, in order to transcend it, to overcome it within the harmonious chronotope of his poetic world. Walden’s broken natural harmony is re-established in Walden in a manner characteristic of Thoreau’s thinking and his emotional need for a pristine, “clean seat”, as he had defined it already in his early Journal. Thus, after his lament over the once “thick and lofty” woods, Thoreau turns with wrath towards “that devilish Iron Horse” which “has muddled the Boiling Spring with his foot” and “has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore”, calling for the “the country’s champion” to meet the howling locomotive “in the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest”. Yet, instead of abandoning himself to the impetus of angry rhetoric, Thoreau, in a single “nevertheless”, makes another turn and begins a series of exalted observations on the pond’s character – its ability to maintain its constant clarity, to even out the ripples over its surface, to remain, after all, “unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on”.115 Thoreau re-establishes his relic, he regains his unsullied holy sanctuary, overthrowing the onslaught of historical time and leaving visible only Walden’s presence in nature’s all-encompassing present moment. And this kind of presence is able to integrate and absorb (and neutralize) all other. Hence, “nevertheless”, the locomotive’s whistle pierces Walden woods “like the scream of a hawk”,116 the train of cars cuts through them “like a comet … with its steam cloud … like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens”, “the iron horse make[s] the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils .… it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it”, and the passing cars evoke the same feeling as watching “the rising of the sun”. 117 The railway track is “Atropos that never turns aside”, “the University Press, 2004, 121-52. 115 Thoreau, Walden, 146. 116 Ibid., 86. 117 Ibid., 87.

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path of fate”, 118 another’s, not his own, choice, but “nevertheless” Thoreau can cross it “like a cart-path in the woods”, 119 thus overcoming its interference, finding himself again within nature’s unspoiled wholeness. “Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it”, 120 Thoreau affirms, continuously pointing to Walden as precisely such a protective place. But reality was different and Thoreau knew that. In fact, the industrial revolution had just reached Walden’s shores. A year before Thoreau’s withdrawal at the pond, the Fitchburg and Concord railway tracks were built by its western bank; the first train arrived in Concord in June 1844; the deforestation had already started and was rapidly expanding.121 But just as Thoreau crosses the railroad in order to step into his holy world, Walden deals with the danger by crossing it, by leaving it behind (outside): “I have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on the other.”122 Although visible, the railway tracks are unimportant as long as Thoreau’s own horizon remains untouchable, “bounded by woods”. This is, in fact, Thoreau’s gaze directed from Walden, still the same gaze because the pond itself provides the same stable viewpoint defining an equally stable horizon. Walden’s steadfast world has here its anchoring point, and just as the pond, remains “perennially young”, without a single “permanent wrinkle after all its ripples”.123 Walden draws within itself, and preserves for itself, only the quiet and peaceful, unmuddied, smooth clarity of the pond’s waters. The same thing happens with the (seemingly accidental) “ripple” of mentioning the cutting of the woods – it quickly disappears, “smoothed out” in the flowing current of observations on the pond’s pellucid depth and moral purity: How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they [White Pond and Walden]! We never 118

Ibid., 88. Ibid., 91. 120 Ibid., 239. 121 See Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986, 386. 122 Thoreau, Walden, 98. 123 Ibid., 146. 119

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learned meanness of them .… She [the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature] flourishes most alone, far from the towns .…124

Exhilarated with nature, making a Puritan appeal for moral catharsis, Thoreau also affirms something very important here – namely, that a place exists “far from the towns” and Walden is such a place – sacred because it has preserved its purity pristine. From this perspective, the mournful digression on the former Walden woods becomes an aesthetic lament, since only Thoreau’s Muse is affected and may be silenced. Yet, the Muse precisely is not silent, but continues meticulously to transform the industrial disharmonies of Concord’s environs into finely shaped harmonious wholes; it is the Muse which re-imagines the railroad by Walden, turning it from a menace to Thoreau’s promised land into the protective border against the outside world. Why is it, in fact, that the machine never appears as a destructive force in Thoreau’s garden in Walden? Why is it that this foundational metaphor of the American nineteenth century, this “metaphoric design”, as Leo Marx calls it,125 is supplanted in Walden by nature’s non-conflictive metaphoric design? Why does Walden criticize the industrial revolution mainly from a moral point of view (for the distraction from the essences, for the ethical damages it causes, etc.), and not from the point of view of nature’s preservation? And finally, why is it that even in the last revisions of Walden, made precisely at a time when Thoreau’s Journal, witnessing to his radical commitment to ecology, was brimming with indignation at the violence done to the environment, Thoreau does not appear to be defending nature but himself within nature, not nature but a self-preservationist, a zealous protector of the correspondence, of the harmonious oneness between Me and Not-Me, of the solitude in the company of pristine nature? Such indeed was the initial idea of the Walden experiment, and Walden was destined to sustain, and promulgate, the defining premises of its success. Emerson’s notion of self-reliance by definition required a “tranquil landscape”, so that “man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature”.126 124

Ibid., 151-52. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, 12-33. 126 Emerson, Selected Essays, 19. 125

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The very idea of “correspondence” implies, in fact, equilibrium and serenity. So Walden preserves the pond’s landscape in its quietude: Walden’s waters remain calm, settled and translucent, its shores “completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods”, while the hero lives “as deliberately as Nature”, 127 with “equal simplicity and innocence”.128 But, in a manner characteristic of Thoreau, the Transcendentalist idea’s practical application exceeds its inherent parameters, entering domains which are deeply personal, intimate and emotional. Thoreau does not allow the then ongoing natural devastation to enter the world of Walden, not only because he wanted to preserve the tranquility of correspondence between inner and outer world and not out of fear of disappointing his readers, but mostly, as Lawrence Buell insightfully points out, “because the pastoralizing impulse to imagine Walden as an unspoiled place overrode his fears about its vulnerability to despoliation …. The vision of a pristine nature close by appealed increasingly to Thoreau for personal as well as for rhetorical reasons.”129 Moreover, “Thoreau felt society’s threat to him more keenly than he felt humankind’s threat to nature”: 130 in Walden, his solution is to blend into a harmonious whole untroubled, tranquil inner and outer landscapes, thus finely sculpting life’s absolute triumph. Thoreau’s pastoralizing impulse was so strong that it subjugated even the factual, even that in nature which remained, by definition, out of man’s reach and command – the sequence of the seasons and their duration. Walden rules over the yearly cycle, forcing nature to follow Thoreau’s pastoral logic; Walden defends its own notion of nature even against nature itself. The long Walden summer, taking up almost two thirds of the book, is the most obvious example: as if, indefinitely prolonged, this summer is in perfect correspondence with Thoreau’s belief in the simplicity of living, possible to attain mainly in the peace and quiet of idyllic nature. The two years spent at the pond become one in Walden, most of their duration spreading over a calm and fertile summer, the extended flow of which underlines all of Walden’s advantages as a sacred and unspoiled place. This deliberate distortion of temporality, transforming the summer into a kind of eternal 127

Thoreau, Walden, 72. Ibid., 65. 129 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 120. 130 Ibid., 136. 128

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summer, once again extracts the Walden experiment from its actual duration, placing it, instead, within the dimensions of all-time and so universalizing its value: the spirit of place, and not the spirit of time, rules over Walden’s world. Thus, within the universal year of Walden, autumn barely lasts; its presence is suggested just enough to lead to winter’s coming. One possible explanation here is to claim that Thoreau had already given its due to autumn in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; but the likelier reason for autumn’s almost complete exclusion is that, with the elegiac moods it evokes, with its traditional associations with death, autumn simply does not match Walden’s overall life-affirming tonality. (Its non-presence, in fact, in its turn, manifests the book’s disregard for time, its attempt to overcome time in favor of the healthy spirit of place.) Walden, however, pays considerable attention to winter. Thoreau evidently pastoralizes winter’s beautifully hushed, pure, healthy, forever brilliant whiteness: Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eye-lids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snowcovered plain, as in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.131

This still, serenely quiet winter beauty, “the same as in summer”, leads, moreover, to a persuasive affirmation: even during this exceedingly cold season, the most difficult to survive, amid the “perennial serenity” of settled blizzards, the Walden experiment with life can continue successfully. And continue thus till the triumphant advent of spring: “As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.”132 Here is the life-affirming climax of Walden, as eternal as nature, as everlasting as myth. Walden shapes its seasons, both in their duration and in their sequence, triumphantly 131 132

Thoreau, Walden, 214-15. Ibid., 236-37.

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culminating in spring and the insuppressible renewal of life. So the optimistic “Conclusion” steps in naturally, like spring after winter, as if following the natural law of the change of seasons: “There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”133 Walden’s world is harmonious, complete, and enclosed (and sheltered) in its wholeness, itself indestructible in its poetic perfection; Walden’s written word erects, as if sculpted by a masterful hand, the quiet and balanced correspondences between Me and Not-Me, keeping out any disharmonizing influences, be they external or inherent to nature. This is a deliberate violence done to reality, justified poetically as a “paradigmatic aesthetic act, rendering nature into an ‘organic’ whole”,134 but, above all, justified in existential terms by Thoreau’s life-preserving need for a pure, unspoiled place. The great writer, the incredibly imaginative Seer, the extraordinary master of style maintains Walden’s harmony stable, inviolable, beautiful, perfect – simplified to the sacred purity of Walden’s water. Yet, Walden is not simply a perfectly sculpted book; it is a book sculpted over the span of an entire, extremely complex decade. The quiet clarity of the pond’s surface barely escapes the bedimming influence of the troubled undercurrents in Walden’s depths. The completeness (and thoroughness) of the book, at the same time, suggests and ensures the incompleteness of Thoreau’s postWalden journal, which “documents … not the fixity of meanings in nature, but the fact that meanings cannot be fixed”.135 Based on his post-Walden journal (his post-Walden experiment), Thoreau’s later observations (essays), as well as the Journal itself, follow his intuition about the factual (existentially important) incompleteness, the inexhaustible openness of nature: and Thoreau would extend, “inexhaustibly”, his thought over the abundance of the New England “autumnal tints”, the taste and the cultural savor of “wild apples”, the dissolution into oneness with nature while huckleberry picking. And Walden, despite its harmoniously shaped poetic world, suggests that beyond the conscious endeavor to attain wholeness of being and the effortlessness of achieving poetic completeness, there is incompleteness meriting equally all-absorbing devotion. 133

Ibid., 252. See Walls, Seeing New Worlds, 164. 135 Ibid., 165. 134

CHAPTER ELEVEN HOMOCENTRISM AND ECOCENTRISM Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?1 Sympathy with Nature is an evidence of perfect health.2 In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?3

I In the perfect harmony of Walden’s poetic world, the process of the book’s decade-long composition can also be discerned in the text’s gradual alignment with the main change in Thoreau’s intellectual disposition, as witnessed by his late Journal: from 1850 onward, Thoreau’s extraordinarily detailed entries recording his daily observations of nature gradually supplant the abstract meditations, abundant quotations and moralist imperatives of the earlier Journal. Although Walden contains the emerging change within the bounds of its Transcendentalist and aesthetic completeness, its text inevitably shows the traces of the transformation in Thoreau’s thinking. In the years following his Walden experiment, Thoreau continued writing and revising Walden, especially its second half, from the chapter “Higher Laws” to the end, by adding numerous new passages, notably expanding the descriptions of natural scenes. This is how Walden moves in this direction: in the introductory chapter “Economy”, Walden Pond is there only in as much as it represents Thoreau’s choice of a fit place for his enterprise: nature is an object of attention 1

Thoreau, The Essays, 133. Thoreau, The Journal, X, 188. 3 Thoreau, The Essays, 121. 2

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only in as much as it provides the background against which the selfreliant Transcendentalist erects his cabin; nothing changes before the chapter “Sounds”, where “the language which all things and events speak” 4 begins to acquire value in itself and continues to become growingly prominent until, in the solitude of Thoreau’s “communion with Nature”, the text arrives at the enchanting landscapes of “The Ponds”, the acute observations of the animal world in “Brute Neighbors” and “Winter Animals”, and the lavish description of the thawing snow on the pond’s shores in “Spring”, the chapter which marks the complete triumph of nature’s presence in the book. The universe of Walden’s nature gradually fills the space of Walden, the observer withdraws in the shadow of what is observed, and nature’s significance in itself comes to the foreground. Walden seems thus to be affirming, in Robert P. Harrison’s phrase, that, in the final analysis, all “to be learned about what is real and not real lies in the exteriority of our inner lives”.5 Gradually, with the accumulation of years past and pages written, Thoreau’s self-devotion in Walden becomes nature-devotion, his introspection becomes extrospection, as a result (and expression) of which his favorite personal pronoun “I”, emphatically salient in the first two chapters of the book, begins to appear with increasing rarity, in more or less inverse proportion to the growing frequency of the nouns “Walden”, “pond”, “wilderness” and their derivatives.6 “As Walden unfolds”, Lawrence Buell notes in this connection, “the mock-serious discourse of enterprise, which implicitly casts the speaker as the self-creator of his environment, gives way to a more ruminative prose in which the speaker appears to be finding himself within his environment”. 7 “Thoreau had to overcome an intense preoccupation with himself, his moods, his identity, his vocation, his relation with other people”, Buell observes elsewhere: “This narcissism he offset by defining as an essential part of his individuality the intensity of his interest in and caring for physical nature itself.”8 However, how does this “changing ratio of homocentrism to 4

Thoreau, Walden, 83. Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 227. 6 See Marlene A. Ogden and Klifton Keller, Walden: A Concordance, New York: Garland, 1985. 7 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 122. 8 Ibid., 118. 5

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ecocentrism”9 reflected in Walden’s progressive transformation, relate to the poetic unity and the sustained Transcendentalist premises of the book, both correlated to the predefined philosophical and aesthetic goal of wholeness, rather than to any notions of process, change and development? How does Walden, continually simplifying its object (as well as its subject) down to a perfectly clarified sense of completeness, absorb the potential of transition, or of incompleteness? Or, perhaps, the opposite interpretative direction should also be suggested: namely, that Walden may have been consciously, conscientiously even, isolated from the Journal, severed from the possibility of its influence. Thus, it is a viable explanation, already offered by critics, that in 1852 Thoreau may have felt the need to keep two separate texts, one to reflect nature for the reader’s sake, and another to present nature for nature’s own sake. Therefore, it could be said that Walden and the Journal developed in radically different directions: Walden was meant to disencumber Thoreau’s personal experience of all unnecessary details, whereas the Journal, on the contrary, recorded and built experience in accordance with the changing phenomena in their passing succession before the author’s gaze.10 It is possible, and indeed convenient, to accept such an explanation. The facts to support it are easy to identify: it is known that, in the last decade of Thoreau’s life, journal-writing acquired for him value in itself (as mentioned in another connection earlier) and that its significance was related to his increasingly passionate interest in and knowledge of natural history, especially botany, but also zoology – including ornithology, entomology and ichthyology.11 It is possible to push this interpretation even further and claim that Thoreau was “happy to relinquish the search for symbolic totality” in his late Journal and essays. 12 No doubt such an interpretation, persuasive enough, contains truth, but it relies on too clear-cut an opposition. It draws a dividing line between Walden and its author, failing to take into account the changes in Thoreau’s thinking and their effect on the decade-long labor over the text, and ignoring, at the 9

Ibid., 121. See Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, 160-163. 11 See John Hildebidle, Thoreau: A Naturalist’s Liberty, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. 12 Walls, Seeing New Worlds, 165. 10

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same time, the book’s aspirations as an intellectual autobiography (while suggesting that Thoreau was happy to do away with wholeness, to get rid of Walden). It seems more productive to consider that Walden and the Journal began to mutually complement and define each other in the period between 1851 and 1854 (the year Walden was published), when the revisions of the book definitely moved towards the abundantly detailed natural descriptions characteristic of the late Journal (but not of the two-year Walden experiment journal entries, whose style emanates the Transcendentalist atmosphere of A Week and the willful self-reliance also reflected in the first two chapters of Walden). Walden matures into the fragmented self-sufficiency of natural descriptions to which the late Journal is entirely dedicated. And the Journal itself remains open-ended, infinite, unfinished precisely by virtue of the saturated valence of the Transcendentalist poetic wholeness its author had achieved in Walden. The accomplishment of Walden’s philosophic-aesthetic project, visible in the text’s selfcontained completeness, points to the impossible completeness of Thoreau’s alert and lively thinking, continuing with the years, with increasing frequency, to pursue its illuminated moments in the knowledge of and devotion to nature for nature’s own sake. Precisely this decade-long gradual shift in thinking, which took place alongside the composition of Walden, transpires in Walden’s text, adding to the book’s already amply layered meaning. This in no way means to suggest that Walden’s narratorprotagonist undergoes a development in the sense of the classical novel, becoming aware, in retrospect, of all that has happened to him. Walden simply is not such a book: it tells of Thoreau’s own life, whose events are deliberate, willful, and not in the least the outcome of chance, so the autobiography (of a real and not a fictional character, at that) becomes representative, exemplary, providing a presupposed, complete in itself model of behavior. Allowing changes in the model, as was mentioned on numerous occasions earlier, would have been absolutely foreign to the Transcendentalist notion of the universal, exemplary value of individual experience: to create a wavering model was unacceptable, hence Walden, with all its complexity of multidimensional meanings, can be seen, at its basis, as an apology of a definite mode of life. Therefore, if something in Walden belies change, or some kind of shift, rather, it can be – and is – solely in the

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nature of Thoreau’s individual experience. This experience retains its representative character in as much as it demonstrates the narrator-protagonist’s exemplary way of life, but, little by little, it incorporates a stronger emphasis on the detailed, indepth knowledge of his surrounding physical nature. Walden gradually creates and confirms the impression that the focus changes from self-reliance in nature for the sake of self to nature-reliance for the sake of nature. Thoreau’s individual experience progresses through several stages, beginning with “Economy” (building the cabin, housework and the entire economic program), farming (tilling the bean-field), land-surveying (the precise measuring of the pond and the lands around it), and expanding, in “House-Warming” and the chapters which follow, into increasingly elaborate and knowledgeable observations of nature (the descriptions of birds and animals, of the ponds, the woods, the bubbles in Walden’s ice, even the grooves left by melting snow in the sand). This may be another reason why, towards the end of his life, when this tendency in his thinking and perception of the world had already become distinct, Thoreau decided to remove the subtitle “Life in the Woods”. Walden is also the triumph of life beyond human presence; it is a hymn and praise to the everlasting life of nature. “The idea that natural phenomena had spiritual as well as material significance appealed strongly to Thoreau throughout his life, although he took a more empirical and ‘scientific’ approach to nature after 1850”, Lawrence Buell observes, but focused on Thoreau’s later interest in “nature’s structure, both spiritual and material, for its own sake”, 13 or on Thoreau’s biocentrism, Buell does not address the motivations which could have lead to such a “‘scientific’ approach”. In an earlier study, however, Buell offers a probable explanation, albeit in passing: The fact is that mere descriptiveness or natural detail in a writer like Thoreau has nothing to do with the depth or immediacy of his personal responses to nature. If anything the relationship is not proportional but inverse. It was precisely during those years when he perfected the art of natural description, the last decade of his life, that Thoreau became acutely conscious of a loss of poetic sensibility and rapport with nature. His inclusion of so much extra descriptive detail 13

Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 117.

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Without some necessary qualifications, this interpretation may seem somewhat unclear and even to an extent contradictory. In his earlier work on Thoreau, Buell puts excessive trust in Thoreau’s own melancholy admission in the journal of 1851 that he had “lost his senses”,15 and so explains the elaborate natural descriptions towards the end of Walden through a compensatory mechanism, identifying Thoreau’s loss of poetic, or Transcendentalist, harmony with the NotMe (about which Thoreau, in fact, writes in the Journal) with losing “the depth or immediacy of his personal responses to nature”. In his later studies, Buell makes a clear distinction between the two, pointing out, again in passing, that “the sense of personal intimacy with nature continued to grow, notwithstanding his increasingly scientific approach to nature study”.16 The reference here is to another of Thoreau’s journal entries from the same period: “I cannot conceive of any life which deserves the name, unless there is a certain tender relation to Nature.”17 In his early work, Buell does not pursue the question further and, unlike many scholars, does not come to see the increasing abundance of natural description in Walden and the texts written thereafter as the symptom of a profound inner crisis which Thoreau was trying to hide;18 neither does he expand, in his later studies, on the interpretations of late Thoreau’s growing “sense of personal intimacy with nature”. In both cases, what remains of importance to Buell is to ascertain a shift in Thoreau’s thought, the demonstration of which leads to shifts in his own thinking over the years. Buell seems perfectly right in avoiding the mire of guesses and tentative explanations, not only because Thoreau has carefully purified all his texts, including his Journal, from all kinds of personal dregs, removing thus evidence potentially useful for interpretation, but also because, beyond any doubt, a thinking man’s natural condition involves the constant, unstoppable metamorphosis of thought, the very fact of which requires no explanation: and Thoreau’s thought quite 14

Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 305. Thoreau, Selections from the Journals, 8. 16 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 209. 17 Thoreau, The Journal, X, 252. 18 See Richard J. Schneider, “Introduction” to Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing, ed. Richard J. Schneider, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000, 1-12. 15

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confidently pursued its course towards ever greater, deeper, scientific and knowledgeable, accurate observations and descriptions of nature. In the final analysis, this calm admission of thought’s natural shifts has become widely acknowledged and the once productive (though not for Buell) myth of Thoreau’s post-Walden decline has receded into the past of American literary studies; Thoreau’s interest in science is no longer seen merely as a replacement of his Transcendentalism but as an integral part of it.19 Laura Dassow Walls, for instance, argues that “Thoreau transformed not from an Emersonian transcendental poet to a fragmented empirical scientist, but from a transcendental holist to something new which combined transcendentalism with empiricism and enabled innovative, experimental and postsymbolic modes of thinking and writing”; 20 and William Rossi claims that “[Thoreau’s] peculiar transcendentalist commitment may actually have fostered rather than retarded his ecocentrism”. 21 Both critics assign its due to the fruitful influence Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin’s works exerted on Thoreau’s views, and their arguments are sufficiently convincing, but with a necessary qualification: Thoreau’s thinking was inherently extremely alert and dynamic, and that was why the combination of Transcendentalist poetics with a scientific approach to nature, at which he arrived gradually and quite naturally, nevertheless made him often acutely conscious of the limitations (the shortsightedness) of science when compared to nature’s absolute boundlessness. Hence late Thoreau’s refusal to become member of the Association for the Advancement of Science in Massachusetts and his famous pronouncement: “The fact is I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot.”22 This is why, however deep Thoreau’s commitment to the empirical study of nature, he always felt the need to give aesthetic form to his observations.23 In everything he ever wrote, in Walden as well as in his later texts, Thoreau felt a necessity to return to his Transcendentalist period and to search, over and over again, for poetic 19

See Richard J. Schneider, Henry David Thoreau, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987, 148. 20 Walls, Seeing New Worlds, 5. 21 William Rossi, “Thoreau’s Transcendental Ecocentrism”, in Thoreau’s Sense of Place, 29. 22 Thoreau, The Journal, V, 4. 23 See Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 125.

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totality beyond the fragmentariness of observed natural facts, “to infer the universal law from the single fact” (Emerson), or, rather, to call upon – and wield – his extraordinary capacities as a poet and a thinker. So, whether he could see more intensely at one point of his life or another, Thoreau always saw beauty, even more so in the last decade of his life, when he had not only achieved the fine mastery of style, but had also experienced, and gained control over, the dramatic potential and the force of his mature thinking. Here is an example of the much revised last chapter of Walden, “Spring”: As it grew darker, I was startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods, like weary travelers getting in late from southern lakes, and indulging at last an unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation. Standing at my door, I could hear the rush of their wings; when, driving toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with hushed clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in, and shut the door, and passed my first spring night in the woods.24

This passage seems to venture into anthropomorphism only in order to overcome it: the text suggests a correspondence between the human and the inhuman natural world but mainly so as to distinguish between the two and even point to their mutual distance, as the human world, in the face of Thoreau, acknowledges the singular rights of the latter. Thoreau goes inside and closes the door in order not to violate the geese’s harmonious existence. His attention focuses on protecting nature’s interest for its own sake, outside of and beyond any human presence or observation (despite the fact that observation makes part of the scene and Thoreau, a few lines later, tells the precise number of geese on the pond – twenty-nine). But passages like this, more and more frequent in Thoreau’s writing after 1850, can hardly be considered as invariably providing proof of Thoreau’s proto-environmentalist commitment in the later years of his life. Even though his thought definitely moved in that direction, such ecological awareness would have been much ahead of its time (the notion of “ecology” was introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, four years after Thoreau’s death). But more importantly, the Emersonian notion of “correspondence” never lost its attraction and 24

Thoreau, Walden, 236.

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importance for Thoreau, even when (perhaps especially when) his approach to nature became predominantly scientific. That is why Thoreau’s scientific study of nature, increasingly intense over the years, and his elaborate natural descriptions, with their occasional ecological overtones, usually go hand in hand with correspondent thinking. This is the case in “Spring”, where the accentuated divide between the natural world (the geese) and the human world is placed alongside, in fact, just next to an unequivocal reference to the sphere of “correspondences”: The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire … the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below .… So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.25

The idea of “correspondences” remained attractive for Thoreau, even when his scientific interests seemed to be pushing him in the opposite direction: precisely then, in fact, he alone among his New England cothinkers insisted on defining himself as “a transcendentalist” – not because he felt the need to compensate for his concentration on natural science, but out of a desire to find the adequate name with which to designate his thought in its continually moving, flowing wholeness. In his maturity, Thoreau was not painfully divided between two apparently contradictory movements of thinking, but, blessed with the ability to see everywhere the aesthetically complete visibilities beyond the fragmentariness of the visible, which he could then understand with ever greater accuracy, he entered his most productive period of perfect intellectual health. Walden, the Journal and everything else written after 1850 testify to the flourishing of Thoreau’s mature thought, whose wholeness was established with the gradual shifts over the years. He captured with great precision the fragmentariness of observation, while remaining faithful to his Transcendentalist poetics; he made distinctions while drawing correspondences, always thorough in his ability to perceive and transmute beauty into words.

25

Ibid., 234.

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“I wish to speak a word for Nature”, Thoreau proclaims with eloquent fervor in the beginning of the essay “Walking”: “I wish to make an extreme statement”, he repeats emphatically, and sets out to contrast the “absolute freedom and wildness” of nature with the “freedom and culture merely civil”, conceiving of “man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society”.26 Composed on the basis of extracts from the late Journal, revised repeatedly and given as a lecture in the years between 1851 and 1857, “Walking” was edited in its final form and prepared for publication in the last months before Thoreau’s death in 1862 (and printed posthumously). The essay, another in the series of works capturing the breadth and the impulses of an entire decade in Thoreau’s intellectual history, is also, among other things, an experiment in which Thoreau’s continuously evolving thought attempts to balance his scientific observation of nature with the Transcendentalist notion of illumination in nature, both for the nature’s own sake and for the sake of man as part of nature. The very idea of “walking” is precisely such a balancing concept: “walking” is simultaneously a “profession” and an “art” (two interchangeable rather than distinguishing qualifications), requiring a special “talent”, with which few are blessed. “Walking” demands faith “in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows”, and depends on the spiritual “subsistence” provided by “the swamps which surround my native town”, Thoreau writes, adding “botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs”.27 In these words, again, Thoreau is not drawing a contrast between the knowledge of natural science and the knowledge which transcends science, but is trying to combine the two. He adds depth to the former while abandoning himself with exaltation to the latter, drawing from the dry names of botany, from the informative accuracy of “the high blueberry, panicled andromeda, lambkill, azalea, and rhodora”, the sublimity of spiritual health which walking among woods and fields provides: My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. 26 27

Thoreau, The Essays, 117. Ibid., 130-31.

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The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before – a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun.28

These lines seem to capture in a nutshell Thoreau’s mature thinking; Thoreau has already attained new kind of visibility beyond the visible, a new kind of knowledge beyond the sophisticated familiarity with visible things, a novel, perhaps more radical, transcendence able to counterbalance the minute, microscopic attention to details in nature. Precisely fortified with this “Sympathy with Intelligence”, illuminated in this new dimension of “telescopic” revelation29 filtered through the “microscopy” of science, Thoreau sets out to “speak a word for Nature” and “make an extreme statement”. What is more, he sets out to speak not so much for or about nature but on her part and in her defense. These are indeed the underlying premises of his statement in “Walking” – in as much as Thoreau identifies himself as part and parcel of Nature, he feels justified to become her representative, her speaker. But as long as being an organic part of Nature depends on walking, a talent with which Thoreau finds himself endowed “almost alone”,30 and as long as the role of representative speaker implies both being elected and being a public mediator, Thoreau’s defense of Nature is addressed to all those who directly or indirectly threaten its integrity. It should be kept in mind that “Walking” was given as a lecture repeatedly before its actual publication in print. The essay’s flaming rhetoric bears the intense affective power of the orator speaking in front of an audience. Thoreau in “Walking” is simultaneously the voice of nature and its defender. The essay evidently continues the New England tradition of oratory, which lends an almost Pilgrim fervor to Thoreau’s words; but the especially emphasized extremeness of the statement also testifies to Thoreau’s radical personal commitment to Nature’s cause, suggesting, at the same time, that his devotion to Nature is the devotion of love. “I fell in love with a shrub oak”, he writes in his late 28

Ibid., 138. Thoreau, The Journal, VI, 133. 30 Thoreau, The Essays, 118. 29

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Journal, 31 and fully dedicated, with reverential affection, in these same final years of his life, confesses: “all nature is my bride.” 32 Always erotically charged, Thoreau’s love for nature is so powerful and so all-absorbing that it unifies into one brotherly affection, friendship and filial love, and is further intensified, moreover, by the sense of being mutual: “Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around”, “Walking” claims fondly, “with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard”. 33 Thoreau’s boundless love for his native countryside forms another wonderful element here: there has hardly been another Concord inhabitant who experienced his belonging to the region with such fulfillment and such conviction in the place’s universal symbolism; there has hardly been anyone else who has walked across the town’s surroundings with such need for intimacy, for oneness of self and nature; there has hardly been anyone who, by some two or three hours walking, “every afternoon”, could reach “as strange a country as [he could] expect … to see”;34 and there has doubtlessly been no one else who has soared to such poetic heights, both in emotion and in writing, reviving indeed the etymology of “Concord” – “agreement, harmony, love”. Precisely with the insatiable passion of someone in love, striving to annihilate the distance with the loved one, coming to know in its deepest details the object of his affections, Thoreau walks amidst nature. Strong affection, thus, presents the obverse side of Thoreau’s late intellectual disposition towards scientific knowledge, observation and description of nature. The “great awakening light” illuminates not only the mind, but also the heart, and so in his walking, Thoreau finds no difficulty in transforming the beautifully concrete, continually renewed, worthy of study vicinity of his native town into the even more magnificent scenes, beyond visibility, of the Holy Land and Elysium. Thoreau’s late scientific approach to nature, increasingly accurate and minute over the years, goes hand in hand with his growing, jealously vindicated sense of passionate intimacy with nature (in the late Journal Thoreau frequently claims to be her sole champion). The 31

Thoreau, The Journal, IX, 146. Ibid., IX, 337. 33 Thoreau, The Essays, 137. 34 Ibid., 121. 32

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two mutually, lovingly, complement each other. Therefore, Nature’s cause is for Thoreau the personal, sacred cause of love, and its defense requires an extreme statement. “When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?” 35 Thoreau believes that there is only one right direction which is natural or faithful to nature (which does not betray nature), and in following this direction, walking invariably leads to Wildness. Nature’s cause is the cause of Wildness, because “life consists with Wildness”. What is more, “not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him”. 36 The need for wild nature, “not yet subdued to man”, is a matter of essential independence, as well as essential dependence for Thoreau. He pleads for the preservation of wildness for its own sake, elevating its value to being synonymous with life as a whole, but, at the same time, he points to man’s continuing need for the unspoiled, independent, uncultured, overflowing and vigorous otherness of nature. Man needs untamed nature, Walden affirms echoing, because “we are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it.”37 This is why the Walden experiment, the journey on the Concord and Merrimack rivers which preceded it and the later trips to the Maine woods and Cape Cod, as well as Thoreau’s daily walking in Concord’s vicinity, are all “approaches to”, “inscriptions within” the vitally important otherness of inhuman nature. For, in order to become “Indra in the sky looking down”, first one has to “live deep and suck out the marrow of life”.38 And the marrow of life runs there, in the depths of nature not subdued to man. So, whereas Walden demonstrates Thoreau’s shift in thinking from homocentrism to ecocentrism, “Walking”, for its part, expresses and defends his radical commitment to the preservation of nature, upholding the ecological cause also for its human implications – wild nature becomes the guarantee of man’s physical but also, and above all, spiritual and intellectual health. And the reverse argument is also suggested in the essay: the spoilage of the wilderness, its subjugation into gardens and malls leads to decline – both physical and, above all, spiritual. 35

Ibid., 120. Ibid., 139. 37 Thoreau, Walden, 101. 38 Ibid., 67. 36

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In “Walking” Thoreau observes: We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste, – sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, – and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on.39

Walking is an intellectual and physical movement by definition in the direction opposing such devastation, because the latter is, according to Thoreau, the wrong direction, which runs contrary to nature, betraying it; going eastward, this is the direction which the Sun, this “Great Western Pioneer”40 never follows. Taming nature while laying it waste (the pigeons fly thither no longer) has the same baleful effect on the human mind – Thoreau sees in the cutting of woods the destruction of thought (once again, here, foreseeing the increasing spiritual bareness brought by consumption for the sake of consumption). The essay, in fact, reveals Thoreau’s commitment, determined by his ecocentrism, to the cause of humanity: for the cause of wild nature for wild nature’s sake implies the cause of man for man’s sake. Thoreau transforms the defense of wild, irrepressible nature into the defense of man thinking. As he declares at the very beginning of “Walking”, he undertakes “to speak a word for Nature”, but also to consider man as an essential part of his natural environment and not as “a member of society” (something which often escapes critical attention, occluded by the essay’s strong emphasis on the preservation of nature and cultural nonconformity). Behind these opening words, whose meaning the essay elaborates in further depth, we can discern the accomplished transformation of Thoreau: the once self-reliant TranscendentalistPoet, who experienced the correspondences between physical world and spirit, and later devoted himself to the observation and scientific study of nature, has already inflected his insurmountable, inherent Romantic homocentrism through the prism of his ecocentrism. (As in Walden, Thoreau “brags lustily”, with the full force of his voice, in order to, yet again, wake his neighbors up.) “I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated”, 39 40

Thoreau, The Essays, 141. Ibid., 126.

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Thoreau claims, entering the limitless domain of new identifications, newly accentuated correspondences in his eco-homo-centric apology, “any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest”. 41 Because, “life consists with wildness”, both for uncultivated, untamed nature and also, correspondingly, for man’s uncultivated, untamed, free consciousness. According to Thoreau, precisely in “Wildness is the preservation of the World”.42 To defend such a notion, one needs faith, faith in wild nature, in the “meadow and forest”, and through them, in something beyond. But how is it possible, and is it not somewhat naïve to speak of such faith in an epoch when scientific knowledge was highly treasured and natural sciences were flourishing? “In the nineteenth century, it was entirely possible and even necessary to ‘believe’ in Nature”, Laura Dassow Walls asserts, adding: … forest and meadow were to be believed in not for themselves alone but for something higher, something they served or translated or embodied. Yet it was also possible in nineteenth-century America to claim nature was its own reason for being … – not immediately responsible to God and perhaps, therefore, not immediately responsive to human will.43

“None of these choices was innocent”, Walls concludes, arguing that in his mature years Thoreau saw the two choices as complementary: “Thoreau arrived at a radical view of nature as a self-generating, creative agent by incorporating Humboldtian protoecological science into traditional and romantic forms of natural theology.” 44 Such a reading is well argued and perfectly convincing; moreover, it discards the possibility of seeing in Thoreau a naïve dilettante in science. Walls emphasizes Thoreau’s competence in the natural sciences, outlining his place within the intellectual and spiritual historical context, while also underlining his abilities as an innovative thinker. Focused, however, on the need to avoid placing Thoreau as a poet-scientist in a “neither/neither” argument, while desiring to acknowledge adequately 41

Ibid., 137. Ibid., 129. 43 Laura Dassow Walls, “Believing in Nature: Wilderness and Wildness in Thoreau’s Science”, in Thoreau’s Sense of Place, 15-16. 44 Ibid., 17. 42

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his value both as a Transcendentalist thinker and a naturalistempiricist, Walls’ scientifically based reading discusses solely the intellectual aspect of Thoreau’s faith “in the forest and meadow”, ignoring entirely the intensely emotional substrata and the unquestionably poetic core of his faith. However, “the science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing”, Thoreau emphatically points out in “Walking”: “The poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.” For, Thoreau asserts with conviction, “he would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him … whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring … aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature”. 45 Thoreau is not searching after the effective metaphor here, but is offering his overall conception of poetry (or of literature) as the art of artlessness; more importantly even, his conception of poetry identifies and acknowledges its differences from the scientific study of nature, and instead of opposing poetry to science, admits and proves their compatibility; poetry absorbs the otherness of science, thus sharpening its own capacity for sympathy with nature and its imagistic proximity with it. Thoreau speaks as “a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot”; Thoreau here is the Poet who refuses to define himself necessarily as “a scientist”, who is able, in his maturity, to encompass the apparently discordant directions of his poetic-scientific being into a wholeness of living and writing of a new kind, both natural and nature-observant. While in earlier years, the naturalness of poetry implied for Thoreau mostly faithfulness to nature, in the later years of “Walking”, it was understood and experienced by him as the supreme faith in wildness – both for nature’s own sake and for poetry’s sake. Thoreau began to look for the poem which “[would] adequately express this yearning for the Wild”, 46 as “in literature it is only the wild that attracts us”.47 Mature Thoreau’s ecocentrism perfectly naturally – in accordance with nature, and in being centered on it – took on the 45

Thoreau, The Essays, 133. Ibid.,134. 47 Ibid., 133. 46

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poetic richness of the creative individual: this could happen only by virtue of Thoreau’s faith in “the forest and meadow”, a faith, more than anything, profoundly poetic in its essence, comprehending also his belief in the immortality of “wild” poetry. Thoreau transformed the cause of wild nature into the cause of true (and truthful) poetry. The gesture was definitely ecopoetic. But it was also intensely personal, because the faith in the pond, the river, the forest and the meadow is the other name of Thoreau’s love for nature, increasingly deep, passionate, and jealously protected with the years. Thoreau makes poetry dependent on wildness with the creative license of a poet, but he does it also with the absolute devotion of a loving man, of a poet in love, devoting the power of his verses to the sole object of his affection; hence, to underline once again but from a different perspective, the extreme character, the extreme emotional charge, of his statement. Poetry’s dependence on wildness is represented as complete, fatal, unconditional dependence. Fervently, Thoreau pleads for “literature which gives expression to Nature”, meaning that such literature is not merely one kind, but the only one kind. He admits, however, that he does not know of any such poetry. The contradiction is above all a skillful rhetorical device, whose function is to introduce the ardent praise of the literature of the future, of the West, of “all good things [that] are wild and free”, of “American mythology”. And Thoreau’s globalizing Romantic ardor is so captivating that its deeply personal, sacredly intimate reverential core remains hidden. Yet, Thoreau hints at the emotional basis of his statement: he does not know of any literature which gives expression to Wildness, not only because “approached from this side, the best poetry is tame”, but also because he cannot find in literature “any account which contents me of that Nature, with which even I am acquainted”.48 Thoreau says no more along these lines and his restraint in itself testifies to his profound sense of intimacy with nature: of “that Nature” with which he is acquainted, he could not receive, nor accept, a satisfactory account from anyone else. Because, lovingly, and more and more jealously, it was to that Nature he devoted (and devoted himself in) his own poetry. As a result, not only Thoreau’s words expanded naturally like spring buds, but his very behavior seemed to take on the natural aspect of inhuman nature. “I love Henry”, Emerson quotes one of his friends, 48

Ibid., 134.

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“but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.”49 Yes, Thoreau was interested in man as a part of nature – and more than anything else, he was that man, that other I of Walden, of the forest, the meadow, to all of which he had dedicated himself with boundless faith and with enormous human love – with love flowing irrepressibly into the word for and of nature and into “walking”. It is by no accident that, especially in the last decade of his life, Thoreau was perceived by his fellow Concord inhabitants as an oddity, even an eccentric. He had never strived to make his way of life socially acceptable, because he had never experienced the need for such social understanding. In his journal of 1856, Thoreau addressed the question, as usual in a very personal manner: I see that my neighbors look with compassion on me, that they think it is a mean and unfortunate destiny which makes me to walk in these fields and woods so much and sail on this river alone. But so long as I find here the only real Elysium, I cannot hesitate in my choice. My work is writing, and I do not hesitate, though I know that no subject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary standards; for ye fools, the theme is nothing, the life is everything.50

Of life, of his own life, sublimated and elevated into the poetry of walking and wording, Thoreau had always written and he continued to write until the end of his days, because, as he noted in January 1857: … there is nothing so sanitive, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields .… Nothing so inspires me and excites such serene and profitable thought .… In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean .… But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits .… I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related .… This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort, or boneset, to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek.51

And “Walking” echoes with its own confession: “I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, 49

Emerson, Selected Essays, 344. Thoreau, Selections from the Journals, 33. 51 Ibid., 34-35. 50

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Chaucer, walked in ….”52 This is the ultimate elevation of personality – the personality of a born poet, moreover – attainable only through love. Thus, it was impossible for Thoreau not to have faith in nature; it was impossible for him not to defend nature – for himself, for nature’s own sake, for the sake of poetry, for the sake of Man – of Man thinking and creating. He upheld his faith and defended its source in the only way fit for a writer – by transforming everything into words, by writing. And words, calling into being, sculpting out of breathing air their addressee, inevitably, and deliberately in the case of the Transcendentalist Thoreau, have a public aspect, so the deeply intimate, cherished, loving, life-preserving devotion to “the forest and meadow” naturally – in purposeful accordance with nature – becomes a cause defended before an audience. While his Journal acquired a value for Thoreau as a thing in itself with the years, not fully meant for any reader, in everything else he wrote in the last decade of his life, Thoreau wielded the public force of words to its maximum degree, mostly in order to defend, insistently, the great cause of wild nature – the supreme eco-cause of his mature thinking. Thoreau delivered repeatedly not only “Walking”, but all his later essays as lectures before putting them in their final shape for publication: the essays’ public biography depended on their unmediated influence both over the listener, as well as, later, over the reader. During those last years, Thoreau indeed set out to “speak a word for Nature”: the different lectures/essays (and the larger works published only posthumously, such as The Maine Woods and Cape Cod) show abundantly the various nuances of Thoreau’s aesthetic and spiritually religious dedication and his unambiguous commitment to the preservation of nature, his Romantically poetic reverence towards the empirical interest in and the scientific study of nature, all the while integrating the varied stresses and strains of his mature complex ecocentric thought. Thus, “The Succession of Forest Trees” delineates the principle of succession in forests, which Thoreau discovered and which, in fact, gives a most solid reason that he be considered a pioneer in ecology.53 In this essay, Thoreau addresses reproachfully his audience from the position of superiority, and lays out his 52

Thoreau, The Essays, 122. See Donald Worster, “Thoreau’s Romantic Ecology”, in Nature’s Economy: The Roots of Ecology, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979, 57-111.

53

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observations with an almost accusatory tone, blaming his audience for failing to perceive what has been visible to him, but, in the final analysis, his wish is to provide farmers and natural scientists with useful information. If in his speech, he accuses his listeners of something, it is their insufficient power of observation and not their attack on nature. In the same year, 1860, in the crowded lecture hall of Concord lyceum, Thoreau delivered his speech “Wild Apples”: intensely poetic, overflowing with awe for nature’s beauty, this speech (published posthumously towards the end of 1862) took up anew the praise of the West and the Wild from “Walking”, but also the gloomy acknowledgement of the fact of growing deforestation: “The era of the Wild Apple will soon be passed. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England”, Thoreau remarks with rebuking sorrow, confirming his words, in the manner of the old Puritans, with a quotation from the Bible: “Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen.”54 During these same months, Thoreau revised and prepared for publication his earlier essay “Autumnal Tints” (also published posthumously in the end of 1862). In its fine poetry, the essay is brimming with admiration for New England’s autumn, “the brilliancy of [whose] our autumnal foliage” amazes “Europeans coming to America”; 55 short poems in prose, in succession, communicate the enchantment of autumnal beauty, visible to those who can see the tints of the purple grass and the red maple tree, of the elm and the sugar maple, of the scarlet oak and the fallen leaves; through wonderfully precise natural details, the early-late Thoreau opens the gaze of the reader towards the marvelous beauty surrounding him, but he also warns the reader to watch over it. For: … a village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition .… What if we were to take half as much pains in protecting them as we do in setting them out .…?56

In “Autumnal Tints” and “Wild Apples”, as well as “Walking” and “The Succession of Forest Trees”, Thoreau’s pathos in his defense of nature finds expression above all in his grieving and angry reproaches 54

Thoreau, The Essays, 220-21. Ibid., 177. 56 Ibid., 193-94. 55

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to his audience and in his call for intense attention to and knowledge of natural laws. Thoreau delivers his true environmentalist vision in “Huckleberries”, an essay written at the same time but left unpublished long after. In this essay, the years-long ecocentric tendency in his thought takes on a clearly distinguishable form – Thoreau pleads for the creation of publicly protected natural areas. He proposes two things: first, the lands by the banks of the Concord river to be preserved as green areas, and second, in every town’s surroundings to set aside “a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, … where a stick should never be cut for fuel … but stand and decay for higher uses – a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation”. 57 These are already concrete projects aiming the protection of the environment, of the wilderness – both for its own sake and for the sake of man and his spiritual and physical health. Clearly, Thoreau’s thinking would have continued in this ecological direction, both in writing and in action. The text of “Huckleberries” was meant to be delivered as a public lecture and published subsequently. But all of this never took place. Thoreau’s untimely death cut short the new breadth and complexity of his mature ecocentric thought. At his death bed, his last words were known to have been “moose” and “Indian”.58 Among the numerous unpublished manuscripts Thoreau left, there are thousands of pages devoted to the North American Indians, apparently meant to be put together as a book. Thoreau admired the Indians’ natural mode of existence, their absolute compatibility with wild nature. But he never strived at the same kind of intimacy with nature for himself. He considered it attractive, “as a form of training rather than as a mode of spirituality”, as Lawrence Buell aptly observes.59 In all of his work on the Indians, Thoreau invariably – and inevitably – preserved his cultural distance, above all because his own intimacy with nature was of the order of a profoundly personal experience, intensified moreover by the radical individualism of the Romantic poet. But Thoreau’s post-Puritan New England predisposition, which inherited the spirit and the traditions of the first European settlers also played a part. 57 Henry David Thoreau, The Natural History Essays of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Robert Sattlemeyer, Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith, 1980, 252-62. 58 Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1051. 59 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 213

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“I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural”, Thoreau declares in “Walking”,60 seeing in the farmer’s redemption of the meadow another manifestation of progress in “the right direction”, from East to West, from Europe to America, from tameness to wildness – and the Indians could not achieve such progress, such movement or walking, as the notion of conscious endeavor was foreign to them. Similarly, in “Wild Apples” Thoreau does not praise the original wildness of nature, but a newly gained wildness – not the indigenous wildness of the crab-apple, but the acquired one of the apple which “like him [man] … has migrated to this New World … making its way amid the aboriginal trees”.61 In this way, the apple affirmed itself, Thoreau believes, it proved its potential for self-reliance. The self-reliant author’s identification with the apple follows quite “naturally”: “Our wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock.” 62 Yes, Thoreau praises wildness, but this is not the wildness of a moose or an Indian – it is wildness elevated into a cult (“cultivated”) by the cultivated newcomer. And precisely this cultivated newcomer would advocate the preservation of wildness – for its sake and for his own sake. “To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to”, “Walking” states, continuing further: So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men’s thoughts. Ah! Already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village.63

Thoreau esteemed precisely this “tanning principle” and watched over it to his very last breath. Emerson’s correspondences never lost their attraction for him, but he transcended into the ecorealms beyond them …. 60

Thoreau, The Essays, 132. Ibid., 207. 62 Ibid., 208. 63 Ibid., 132. 61

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Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. ––, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995. ––, Literary Transcendentalism. Style and Vision in the American Renaissance, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1973. ––, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Calhoun, Daniel, Professional Lives in America: Structure and Aspiration, 1750-1850, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Cameron, Sharon, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Cavell, Stanley, The Senses of Walden, New York: Viking, 1972. Chai, Leon, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Channing, William Ellery, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873. Charvat, William, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 18101835, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936. Cook, Reginald, “Ancient Rites at Walden”, in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Walden, ed. Richard Ruland, Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968, 93-100. Edgell, David P., William Ellery Channing: An Intellectual Portrait, Boston: Beacon, 1955. Engelberg, Karsten, ed., The Romantic Heritage: A Collection of Critical Essays, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Press, 1983. Foerster, Norman, Nature in American Literature, New York: Macmillan, 1923. ––, “The Intellectual Heritage of Thoreau”, Texas Review, II (1917), 192-212. Frothingham, O.B., Transcendentalism in New England (1876), rpt. New York: Harper, 1959. Fussell, Edwin, Lucifer in Harness: American Metre, Metaphor, and Diction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. Gilmore, Michael T., American Romanticism and the Marketplace, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

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Lewis, R.W.B., The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. McIntosh, James, Thoreau As Romantic Naturalist: His Shifting Stance toward Nature, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1974. Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Matthiessen, F.O., American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, London: Oxford University Press, 1941. Maynard, W. Barksdale, Walden Pond: A History, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Miller, Perry, Errand Into the Wilderness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. ––, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, New York: Harcourt, 1965. ––, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, New York: Macmillan, 1939. ––, “Thoreau in the Context of International Romanticism”, New England Quarterly, 34 (June 1961), 147-59. Moldenhauer, Joseph, “Paradox in Walden”, in The Recognition of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Wendell Glick, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969, 351-65. Myerson, Joel, “Introduction”, in Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844-1846, eds Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Paul, Sherman, Repossessing and Renewing: Essays in the Green American Tradition, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. ––, The Shores of America, Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1958. Peach, Linden, British Influence on the Birth of American Literature, London: Macmillan, 1983. Peck, H. Daniel, ed., The Green American Tradition: Essays and Poems for Sherman Paul, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1989. ––, “‘Further Down the Stream of Time’: Memory and Perspective in

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INDEX

adequacy, 152, 155, 178, 185 alert, 6, 78, 128, 138, 232, 235 Aeolian harp, 110, 184, 195 aesthetic-religious, xi, 37, 41, 45, 47, 50-55, 61, 63, 65, 69, 75; aesthetics, 34, 37, 39, 54, 60, 61, 70, 96, 209 Alcott, Bronson, 14, 41, 47, 51, 52, 61, 77, 79, 150, 158, 159, 251 America, xi, 3, 4, 7, 13, 16, 18, 19, 21-27, 44, 60, 62, 72, 73, 74, 77, 81, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94-102, 105, 106. 109, 110, 111-14, 122, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 145, 146, 174, 175, 176, 181, 182, 226, 249, 250; American Adam, 5, 115, 129; culture, 92, 221; dream, 195; experience, 18, 183; history, 22, 24, 73, 118; identity, xi, 86, 97, 100, 111, 135, 140, 174, 175; Indians, 16, 249; literature, 15, 56, 59, 62, 91, 94, 96, 97, 98, 125, 140, 144, 198; nation, 14, 21; nature, 16, 88, 90, 117, 131, 176; Renaissance, 52, 72, 89; self, 17, 86, 88, 174, 175; soil/land, 15, 21, 142;

tradition, 5, 22, 86, 163; Transcendentalism, xi, xii, 4, 9, 11, 24, 40, 52, 89, 101, 120, 137, 199; Americans, 15, 20, 21, 29, 81, 111, 126, 138, 176 apocalypse, 87, 132 Arbella, 14, 17 art, xi, 16, 29-32, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51-55, 56, 60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 72, 74, 81; artist, 13, 37, 60, 65, 67, 72; artistic, xi, xii, 11, 15, 16, 29, 31, 36, 41, 44, 47, 48, 62, 63, 65, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75; artlessness, 37, 53, 54 Atlantic, 17, 22, 85, 89, 91, 95, 97, 111, 112, 114, 117, 118, 130, 133, 134, 136, 138, 142, 175, 176 Aurora, 192, 211, 219 autobiography, 6, 118, 143, 156, 157, 162, 167, 202, 222, 232 awake, 9, 11, 20, 29, 73, 114, 115, 133, 187, 192, 197, 206, 207, 210, 214, 217, 222, 240 Baker, Carlos, 108, 253 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 17, 18, 86, 88, 174, 222, 254

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bible, 35, 36, 40, 43, 44, 46, 55, 248 Bishop, Jonathan, 160, 196, 254 Boorstin, Daniel, 22, 111, 254 Boston, 3, 7, 8, 11, 13, 22-25, 29, 39, 43, 47, 70, 71, 74, 81, 85, 86, 136, 138, 139, 143, 145, 156, 158, 170, 200, 205, 207, 235 Bradford, William, 3, 15, 17, 253; Works: The Plymouth Plantation, 15, 17 Brook Farm, 15 Brownson, Orestes, 8, 51, 61, 135, 137, 146, 150, 251 Buell, Lawrence, ix, 7, 10, 14, 28, 29, 33, 35, 40, 44, 54, 67, 68, 77, 80, 82, 159, 169, 182, 185, 189, 191, 219, 226, 230, 233, 234, 235, 249, 252 Callhon, Daniel, 74, 254 Cameron, Sharon, 232, 254 Carlyle, Thomas, 4, 9, 33, 75, 85, 91, 92, 97, 99, 100, 101, 117-27, 130-32, 135, 137, 138, 141, 142, 175, 251; Works: Sartor Resartus, 99 Cavell, Stanley, 220, 254 change, 5, 7, 28, 29, 32, 45, 62, 74, 85, 91-122 passim, 136-157 passim, 163-93 passim, 197-238 passim Channing, Ellery, 11, 15, 23, 29, 33-35, 41, 47, 52, 72, 76, 79, 136, 205, 252, 254, 255

civilization, 132, 175, 190, 193, 230 Clarke, James Freeman, 7, 136, 252, 259 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 9, 33, 91-93, 97-101, 103, 110- 12, 117, 123, 124, 127, 131, 155, 203, 251; Works: Aids to Reflection, 97, 98, 124; Biographia Literaria, 93, 97, 101, 111; “Ode to Dejection”, 117, 162, 208, 209 Concord, 13-15, 76, 81, 92, 118, 122, 136, 150, 156, 158, 167, 183, 186, 189-91, 193, 197, 198, 205, 215, 221-25, 230, 240, 241, 246 Confucius, 212 correspondence, 16, 34, 50, 68, 71, 75, 80, 87, 92, 95, 100, 102, 124, 126, 135, 140, 146, 153, 154, 156, 169, 178, 179, 182, 198, 209, 220, 225, 226, 228, 236, 237, 242, 243, 250 Declaration of Independence, 21, 22; Declaration of Independence, 26, 99, 136 Defoe, Daniel, 32; Works: Robinson Crusoe, 19, 20 “The Dial”, 4, 8, 41, 47, 48, 69, 93, 96, 138, 142, 157, 161, 166, 252 Dickens, Charles, 11, 25; Works: American Notes, 11 Dickinson, Emily, xi

Index Dwight, John Sullivan, 47, 52, 78 East, 4, 14, 20, 23, 29, 49, 57, 65, 69, 70, 85, 111, 120, 130-32, 194, 195, 242, 250 ecocentrism, viii, 229, 231, 233, 235, 237, 239, 241-44, 247, 249, 258 ecopoetic, 245 Eddas, 212 Edwards, Jonathan, 22, 111 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, vii, 311, 14-16, 25, 35, 36, 38-40, 42-51, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60-62, 65-67, 70-72, 78, 80, 81, 85-115, 117, 118, 123, 125, 126, 135, 137-40, 143-46, 149-51, 153, 154, 156-61, 163-82, 185, 186, 188, 190, 194, 199, 205, 212-14, 217, 220, 225, 235, 236, 245, 250, 251, 254; Works: The Journals, 36, 39, 45, 61, 75, 92, 94, 95, 160, 167, 179, 180, 251; The Letters, 80, 251; Nature, 16, 25, 49, 88, 89, 93, 94, 96, 99, 102, 112, 154, 172, 175, 177, 178, 217; Representative Men, 46, 100, 178; “The American Scholar”, 25, 86, 87, 89, 90, 93, 97, 101, 103, 111, 113, 115, 125, 149, 150, 151, 154, 167, 169, 172, 174, 178, 180; “The Divinity School Address”, 45; “Fortune of the Republic”, 86; “Modern

261 Aspects of Letters”, 98, 177, 178, 217; “The Over-Soul”, 94, 98, 172, 178; “The Poet”, 45, 65, 86, 103-5, 107, 115, 172, 173, 175, 178, 179; “Poetry and Imagination”, 93, 94, 96, 101; “Self-Reliance”, 94, 150, 172, 175, 177, 178; “Thoreau”, 156, 169, 17072, 174, 178-82; “The Transcendentalist”, 3-5, 9; “Woodnotes”, 94 England, 85, 92, 121, 145 English literature, 19, 99, 104, 144; mind, 92; pilgrims, 13, 14; Protestantism, 17; race, 85; Romanticism, 91; Romantics, 67, 68, 92, 122, 130 Enlightenment, 15, 18-24, 27, 28, 31, 32 enterprise, 79, 181, 200, 211, 229 epic, 107, 109, 164, 211-14, 216 eternity, 17, 59, 104, 109, 164, 186, 187, 190, 198, 199, 210, 216, 237 experiment, 118, 130, 163, 188, 200, 201, 205-7, 21115, 220, 221, 225, 227-29, 232, 235, 238, 241 extravagance, 185, 209, 210 faith, xi, xii, 10, 15, 17, 18, 22, 26-28, 31, 32, 35, 38, 40, 42, 43, 53, 54, 60, 61, 65, 74, 78, 92, 93, 129, 134,

262

Visibility Beyond the Visible

185, 188, 195, 199, 209, 237, 238, 241, 243-47 Fielding, Henry, 19, 31, 32; Works: Tom Jones, 19 Foerster, Norman, 123, 125, 255 forefathers, 13, 15, 25, 38, 39, 74, 86, 89, 120, 130, 158, 174, 195 Franklin, Benjamin, 21, 22 Frothingham, O. B., 9, 26, 255 fulfillment, 16-18, 61-93 passim, 104, 160, 164, 213, 218, 240 Fuller, Margaret, 14, 47, 52, 61, 69, 70, 77, 79, 135-46, 150, 158, 159, 252; Works: Summer on the Lakes, 145; A Woman of the Nineteenth Century, 145; on Carlyle, 142; on Goethe, 140, 146; on European literature, 135, 138-40; “The Dial”, 47, 69, 138, 143; on the Italian revolution, 138; on Shelley, 141 genius, 40, 49, 69, 75, 87, 91, 93, 98, 105, 109, 113, 114, 124, 135, 136, 139, 170, 172, 173, 176, 177-81 genius loci/place-sense, 87, 95, 109, 114, 118, 119, 121, 125, 130, 142, 188 Goldsmith, Oliver, 32 Greeley, Horace, 137, 146 Harding, Walter, ix, 5, 7, 123, 124, 151, 153, 157, 162,

169, 184, 205, 206, 208, 253, 255 Hartman, Geoffrey, 96, 132, 256 Harvard, 4, 5, 24, 27, 31, 38, 43, 44, 74, 75, 80, 85, 91, 98, 123, 149, 150, 154, 158, 160, 220, 231 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, xi, 25, 67, 126, 140; Works: The Marble Faun, 25 health, 20, 60, 62, 143, 181, 212, 213, 227, 229, 237, 238, 241, 249 Hedge, Frederick Henry, 60, 150; “The Hedge Club”, 151, 167 Homer, 164, 211, 212, 214-16, 244, 246; Iliad, 211, 212, 215; Odyssey, 211 homocentrism, 229, 231, 233, 235, 237, 239, 241-49 passim hymn, 125, 131, 143, 185, 188, 193, 216, 233 idealism, 3, 31, 96, 182; idealist, 4, 5, 7, 96, 132, 182 imagination, 10, 40, 50, 56, 62, 88-90, 93, 94, 96, 98, 101, 104, 107, 109, 110, 112, 114, 126, 130, 178, 190, 219, 226, 230, 233-35, 249 individualism, 89, 101, 110, 143, 181, 249; individualist, 11, 13 inspiration, xii, 11, 14, 18, 25, 33, 36-63, 66, 67, 69-71, 78,

Index 86, 90, 103, 110, 112, 157, 163, 167, 184, 217 intellectual, xi, 4-10, 22, 24, 26, 27, 30-35, 37, 42, 44, 62, 70-75, 78, 81, 85, 86, 88-93, 97, 99, 100, 103, 104, 111, 123, 136, 137, 143-45, 149-51, 157, 161, 166, 170, 181, 194, 229, 232, 237, 238, 240-44 intuition, 3, 9, 11, 37-41, 44, 48, 50-52, 56, 89, 109, 228 Jefferson, Thomas, 20, 21, 176 Johnson, Samuel, 31 journal, 3, 5, 6, 22, 36-38, 45, 47, 48, 51, 53, 60, 61, 65, 71, 75-79, 92, 94, 95, 99, 117, 124, 127-29, 131, 138, 141, 143, 151, 157-69, 171, 172, 178-80, 184, 186-89, 199, 200, 202-6, 211-14, 217, 219, 223, 225, 228, 229, 231, 233-35, 237, 238 Joyce, James, 107; Works: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 107 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 4, 9, 33, 89, 97, 104, 110, 112, 114, 252 Language Maker, 101, 156 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 19 life, 4-10, 14-22, 24, 28, 29, 31, 32, 40, 45, 48, 49, 56, 63, 65, 67-80, 82, 94, 101,

263 102, 106, 108, 111, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 126131, 133, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 149-51, 153-59, 161-72, 174, 178, 179, 18192, 194, 195, 197-222, 224, 226-28, 231-34, 236, 237, 240, 241, 243, 246, 247 Locke, John, 3, 9, 33; Lockean, 11 London, 98, 100, 117, 118-22, 125, 126, 138 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 43, 44 love, 49, 80, 96, 97, 120, 132, 146, 154, 176, 180, 186, 196, 197, 204, 217, 219, 220, 239-41, 245-47 lyceum, 74-76, 151, 248 McIntosh, James, 92, 126-29, 132, 256 Man Thinking, 101, 111, 242, 247 Marx, Leo, ix, 225, 226 Massachusetts, 5, 23, 27, 39, 44, 67, 71-73, 76, 80, 81, 85, 125, 149, 218, 235 Matthiessen, F.O., 52, 54, 72, 257 Mayflower, 13, 15, 17, 21, 39 Melville, Herman, xi, 102, 126, 252 memory, 14, 129, 131, 163, 165, 177, 186, 187, 189, 192, 194, 196, 197, 215 metaphor, 15-17, 45, 57, 58, 72, 77, 78, 80, 89, 99, 124, 126, 127, 129, 162, 191,

264

Visibility Beyond the Visible

192, 195, 203, 217, 221, 225, 244 Miller, Perry, 10, 38, 39, 93, 117, 153, 158, 163, 165, 253, 257 mission, 5, 17, 20, 23, 25, 31, 34, 35, 38, 39, 42, 54, 62, 63, 69, 70, 75, 79-81, 85-87, 104-6, 140, 157, 174, 177, 179, 181, 201, 203, 234, 235 moral, 10, 14, 19, 27-32, 34, 35, 44-47, 49, 55, 58, 60-63, 65-69, 81, 85, 88, 102-4, 114, 125, 141-43, 158, 172, 181, 194, 205, 209, 219, 220, 224, 225, 229 morning, 117, 128, 162, 192, 195, 197, 199, 202, 203, 211, 214, 215, 228 Myerson, Joel, ix, 140, 141, 252 Namer, 156 naming, 71, 153-155 Nature, 15-18, 60, 62, 78, 8890, 92-94, 96-100, 102, 106, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125-32, 134, 149, 150, 156, 166, 167, 169, 170, 173, 176, 177, 179, 184, 185, 189194, 197-201, 203, 206, 211, 213-17, 219, 220, 22240 New Adam, 5, 115, 129 New England, xi, xii, 3-5, 7, 911, 13-18, 23, 25, 27-29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 56, 59, 68, 71-75,

77, 81, 82, 85-87, 89-91, 95, 97, 100-2, 119, 123, 125, 130, 133-36, 145, 158, 159, 166, 174, 175, 193, 198, 242, 248; New England culture, 4, 5, 37, 82, 95; identity, 90, 92, 117, 136; literature, 31; puritan background, 174, 181 New Jerusalem, 17, 87, 97, 109, 114, 126, 134, 195 New World, 14, 16, 17, 20, 23, 31, 33, 38, 40, 86, 87, 8991, 98-100, 109, 111, 114, 115, 123, 125, 129, 130, 142, 174, 193, 195, 208, 216, 220, 228, 231, 235, 250 “New York Daily Tribune”, 138, 143, 146 Novalis, 155 Old World, 14-17, 20, 111, 117, 123, 127, 130, 142 Paine, Thomas, 21; Works: The Age of Reason, 21 Parker, Theodore, 72, 76, 77, 150, 158 pastoral, 220, 225-27, 256 Paul, Jean, 155 Paul, Sherman, 60, 77, 86, 88, 153, 161, 163, 183, 191, 196, 200, 210, 257 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 77, 78, 150 Peabody, W.B.O., 29 Peach, Linden, 93, 94, 96-98, 257

Index Peck, H. Daniel, 163, 164, 187, 257, 258 perception, 17, 22, 25, 30, 34, 39, 56, 61, 75, 79, 85, 89, 93, 124, 129, 130, 136, 140, 143, 144, 165, 177, 178, 233 perfection, xi, xii, 9, 20, 23, 30, 42, 61, 82, 107, 124, 165, 166, 185, 194, 196, 200, 201, 203, 208-10, 228 personification, 4-6, 8, 11, 46, 51, 87, 100, 106, 109, 125, 138, 219 philosophy, 3, 6, 8-11, 27, 41, 57, 58, 89, 90, 93, 94, 97, 100, 111, 112, 118, 216, 239 Plymouth, 13-15 Poe, Edgar Allan, xi, 56-60, 67, 252; Works: “The Philosophy of Composition”, 57; “The Poetic Principle”, 57; “The Raven”, 57 poet, xi, 5, 13, 35, 40-46, 51, 55, 56, 58, 60-62, 65, 67-70, 72, 79-82, 86, 87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96-101, 103-7, 11015, 120, 121, 124-126, 12830, 139, 141, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 166, 168, 172, 173, 175, 178, 179, 193, 194, 201, 213, 216, 235, 236, 242-47, 249; poetic, xi, xii, 10, 11, 14-16, 18, 25, 29-32, 36, 39, 41-45, 48, 50, 52, 53, 55-60, 62, 66, 67, 69, 71, 77, 78, 80-82, 88,

265 90, 91, 95, 100, 104, 125, 161, 168, 169, 178, 179, 200, 201, 206, 209, 210, 216, 217, 220, 221, 223, 228, 229, 231-35, 244-48; Poet-Priest, 8, 44-48, 51, 54-56, 61, 63, 66, 68-71, 75, 76, 78, 80, 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 93, 99, 101, 102, 106, 125, 128, 167; poetry, 6, 10, 11, 17, 25, 29, 31, 31, 3335, 39, 40, 41, 43, 47, 50, 54, 55, 58-60, 62, 67-69, 71, 72, 74, 80, 81, 89, 90, 9396, 98, 101, 103-5, 109-15, 120, 121, 124, 126, 151, 155, 166, 178, 193, 201, 205, 244. 245, 247, 248 Porter, Noah, 8 Post-Kantianism, 85 preservation, 78, 97, 100, 127, 132, 158, 225, 241-43, 247, 250 protestant, 7, 8, 17, 20, 27, 28, 38, 73, 86, 108, 132, 169, 172-74, 177, 179, 180, 181 Puritanism, 13, 15, 17-21, 23, 24, 27, 29, 31, 35 Rationalism, 13, 18, 21, 22, 24, 26-28, 32, 34, 37, 39, 73, 125 religion, 10, 11, 17, 18, 21, 24, 26, 28-30, 32-35, 39-41, 43, 45, 46, 48, 52, 54, 55, 59, 60, 62, 67, 68, 72-74, 89, 94, 173, 174, 193, 216 revelation, 11, 27, 30, 32, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42, 43, 47, 49-

266

Visibility Beyond the Visible

55, 58, 60-62, 65, 69, 78, 87, 89, 94, 109, 133, 134, 143, 153, 158, 162, 166, 194, 195, 203, 239 rhetoric, 15, 30, 31, 42, 48, 53, 75, 89, 91, 97, 104-9, 151, 158, 159, 187, 203, 211, 215, 223, 226, 239, 245 Richardson, Samuel, 32 Ripley, George, 7, 15, 150 Romanticism, 15, 23, 85, 91, 92, 95, 103, 117, 125, 139, 143, 155 Rossi, William, 224, 235, 258 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 155 saint, 45, 134 sanctuary, xii, 55, 89, 93, 194, 196, 220-23 Sand, George, 140, 155 saunter,133; sauntering, 196 Saxton, Jonathan, 7,8 seer, 7, 45. 49, 50, 101, 112, 113, 120, 121, 217, 228; seer-sayer, 45, 49, 50, 101 self-naming, 153, 156; self-reliance, 61, 102, 139, 145, 149, 151, 159, 163, 168, 169, 172, 178, 188, 205, 213, 218, 225, 232, 233, 250 Sentimentalism, 15 settlement, 13, 15-18 settlers, 14-16, 18-20, 22, 23, 31, 34, 35, 38, 39, 42, 60, 85-87, 120, 173, 174, 249 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 103105, 110-14, 140, 141, 143, 252; Works: A Defence of

Poetry, 103, 104, 110; Prometheus Unbound, 103 simplify, 10, 161, 167, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206, 213, 231 Smollet, Tobias George, 32 society, 7, 33, 76, 90, 109, 127, 132, 140, 176, 181, 190, 199, 218, 226, 238, 242, 246 solitude, 25, 88, 90, 102, 205, 207, 218, 220, 225, 230, 246 space, 96-100, 102, 105, 113, 119, 120, 184, 190, 197, 198, 219, 230 spiritual, xi, xii, 4-6, 9-11, 1417, 21, 23, 26, 27, 29, 3033, 35, 41, 42, 44-46, 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 60-62, 66, 71, 73-75, 85, 89, 91, 99, 102-4, 108, 110, 119, 120, 124, 126, 134, 136, 141, 143, 151, 161, 166, 167, 169, 178, 179, 182-84, 186, 189, 190; autobiography, 118, 162, 222; calling, 107; leader, 151; spirituality, 104, 105, 149, 174, 181, 188, 249 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 46, 75, 93 thinker, xi, 15, 29, 36, 60, 71, 85, 91, 95, 100, 101, 111, 117, 122, 126, 139, 158, 168, 170, 175, 179, 182, 201, 236, 237, 243, 244

Index time, 3-6, 8, 9, 13, 15, 16, 2124, 26, 27, 29-34, 41, 44-46, 61, 62, 72, 73, 76, 81, 82, 85, 88-90, 92, 99-103, 105, 106, 109, 118, 122, 198, 199, 204, 207-9, 213, 215, 218, 220-22, 224, 225, 227, 228, 236, 249 Thoreau, Henry David, 3, 5-7, 10, 11, 13-17, 37, 41, 47, 52, 53, 60, 61, 65, 66, 7679, 81, 90, 91, 95, 96, 111, 117-36, 139, 142, 149-74, 176-250, 253; Works: Cape Cod, 16, 247; The Journal, 3, 6, 38, 47, 53, 61, 65, 7679, 124, 127, 129, 131, 157, 158, 162-68, 180, 187, 200, 202-6, 211-14, 217, 219, 223, 228-46 passim; The Maine Woods, 16, 156, 247; Walden, 6, 7, 16, 53, 78, 79, 81, 117, 118, 120, 121, 126, 128, 130, 151, 153, 156, 157, 161-63, 169, 182-88, 199, 200-16, 218, 220-37, 241, 242; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 16, 79, 132, 156, 163, 171, 183-96, 198, 2003, 209, 210, 213, 227, 232, 249; “Autumnal Tints”, 228, 248; “Huckleberries”, 249; “Thomas Carlyle and His Works”, 117-23; “Walking”, 16, 123, 127, 130-32, 175, 196, 238-42, 244, 246- 48, 250; “Wild Apples”, 248, 250

267 Transcendentalism, xi, xii, 4, 6-11, 14, 22, 24-29, 33, 35, 40, 42-82 passim, 85, 89, 101, 109, 117, 120, 137, 159, 161, 185, 189, 191, 199, 234, 235 Transcendentalist, xi, xii, 3-28 passim, 35-45, 47-63, 6582, 85-92, 105, 111, 112, 117-21, 123-31, 133, 135, 136, 138, 142, 143, 150-68 passim, 171, 184-86, 188, 192, 201-47 passim travel, 17, 21, 118, 145, 146, 191-94, 198, 222, 236 travelogue, 145, 198 truth, xii, 8, 9, 15, 16, 29, 30, 33, 37, 40, 42-73 passim, 88, , 92, 99, 101-25 passim, 154-188 passim, 193-245 passim Unitarianism, 9, 23-33, 35, 38, 54, 73, 74, 101 Vedas, 212, 218 Very, Jones, 47, 51, 52, 150 vision, 7, 42, 45, 46, 50, 55, 61-99 passim, 104, 109, 112-249 passim vocation, 13, 18, 35, 54, 62-86 passim, 144-168 passim, 183, 192, 194, 201, 230 Walden, 14, 79, 118, 119, 12528, 130, 133, 153, 184, 18689, 192, 194, 196, 197, 20033 passim, 241, 246

268

Visibility Beyond the Visible

walking, 133, 144, 165, 176, 178, 179, 192, 195, 196, 238-42, 246, 250 Walls, Laura Dassow, 208, 216, 220, 228, 231, 235, 243, 244, 259 water, 78, 176, 190-194, 216, 218-228 passim West, 14, 16, 56, 111, 120, 125, 131-34, 145, 146, 194, 195, 222, 224, 242, 245, 248, 250 Whitman, Walt, xi, 45, 52, 56, 125, 126 wild, 16, 90, 117, 120, 126, 127, 131, 133, 198, 216, 225, 228, 241-45, 247, 248; wilderness, 16, 26, 38, 111, 113, 121, 125, 127, 146, 193, 230, 241, 243, 249; wildness, 125, 130, 134, 193, 238, 241, 243-46, 250

Winthrop, John, 13, 17, 19, 20, 253; Works: “A Model of Christian Charity”, 13, 17, 19 Wordsworth, William, 4, 9, 91-93, 95-101, 103, 110, 112, 117, 123, 124, 129, 131, 132, 253; Works: Lyrical Ballads, 93, 94, 96, 103; “Lucy”, 93; “Michael”, 93; “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, 93, 129, 131; “The Tintern Abbey”, 93 world, xi, 16, 19-23, 28, 31-35, 42, 74, 78-192 passim, 194243 passim; world literature, 140, 144