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Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a
religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of
subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him "to be a good
minister, it was necessary to leave the church." The address he
delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School,
made him unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years. In it, Emerson
accused the church of acting "as if God were dead" and of
emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit.
Emerson's philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true that he consciously avoided building a logical intellectual system because such a rational system would have negated his Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility. In his essay "Self-Reliance," Emerson remarks: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Yet he is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Most of his major ideas -- the need for a new national vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation -- are suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836). This essay opens:
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the
fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. 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 a poetry of
insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us,
and not the history of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature,
whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us
by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why
should we grope among the dry bones of the past...? The sun
shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields.
There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own
works and laws and worship.
Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the 16th-century French essayist Montaigne, and he once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted to write a book like Montaigne's, "full of fun, poetry, business, divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut." He complained that Alcott's abstract style omitted "the light that shines on a man's hat, in a child's spoon."
Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make Emerson exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared listening to him with "going to heaven in a swing." Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern religion, especially Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. For example, his poem "Brahma" relies on Hindu sources to assert a cosmic order beyond the limited perception of mortals:
Far or forgot to me is near
They reckon ill who leave me out;
The strong gods pine for my abode,
Or the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings
And pine in vain the sacred Seven,
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
This poem, published in the first number of the Atlantic Monthly magazine (1857), confused readers unfamiliar with Brahma, the highest Hindu god, the eternal and infinite soul of the universe. Emerson had this advice for his readers: "Tell them to say Jehovah instead of Brahma."
The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important writings in English in the 19th century had been Wordsworth's poems and Emerson's essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson influenced a long line of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert Frost. He is also credited with influencing the philosophies of John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James.
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