Emerson: The Mind on Fire VI

In 1855, Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass and sent a copy to Emerson. Emerson read it immediately and liked it. He wrote back to Whitman approvingly. Without permission, Whitman had the letter printed in the New York Tribune.  Thereafter, Whitman became the poetic model for Emerson, and Whitman built his reputation on that. If I were Emerson, I would have disliked Whitman's shameless opportunism, but Emerson was also opportunistic, and in Whitman he had found a poet who seemed to fit his literary ideals. Since this is my last post on the biography, I'll say that I don't find Emerson, Thoreau or Whitman to be particularly good poets. By this time, Emerson was having a hard time living up to his "great man" ideal.

During Emerson's later life, there were growing abolitionism and women's rights movements, and he participated in them. To his credit, he publicly opposed materialism. In a commencement address at Williams College in 1854, he said "It is the vulgarity of this country—it came to us with commerce, out of England—to believe that naked wealth, unrelieved by any use or design, is merit." When Darwin's Origin of Species became available in 1860, he read it with interest. In Richardson's description, it doesn't sound as if Emerson or Thoreau had a good understanding of speciation, though they were sympathetic toward the general concept of evolution. Thoreau died from tuberculosis in 1862.

By the1870's, Emerson was quite famous and was  still accepting engagements. In 1871 he took a trip out west, during which he met Brigham Young in Salt Lake City and John Muir at Yosemite. In 1872 there was a fire at his house, but the damage was repaired. Following the fire, he took a trip to England, France, Italy and Egypt with his daughter, Ellen. They returned in May, 1873. His memory gradually deteriorated, with Alzheimer's symptoms, and he died from pneumonia on April 27, 1882, at the age of 78. Lidian lived to the age of 90, dying in 1892.

At this stage, I have a fairly mixed view of Emerson. On the positive side, there are his humanistic qualities: he valued equality and disliked material excess. He emphasized the importance of natural environments, but so did many others at the time. For me, his most important impact was on Emily Dickinson. Many of her poems directly embody some of Emerson's ideas. Though they never met, she read his works and attended one of his lectures. I think that what distinguishes Dickinson from the proclaimed transcendentalists is that she had exactly the right feelings and exactly the right words. To me, she is a far more skilled writer than Emerson. In Emerson's case, you can imagine him saying to himself "By God, I'm having a spiritual experience!" I don't agree with his endorsement of Whitman.

I think that there is more to criticize about Emerson in his postures as an intellectual. He was sort of a Romantic social climber, but his timing was all off. When he first arrived in England in 1833, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Goethe were already dead, and Coleridge and Wordsworth were old. The best ally he could come up with was Thomas Carlyle, who was not a particularly good fit for him. More significant, I think, was his compulsively wide reading in conjunction with his dilettantish summation of it. Also, I think that he set the bar for himself quite low by relying primarily on public lectures, often to uneducated audiences. Though I do make allowance for the fact that the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology and archaeology barely existed in those days, he liked to quote people who lived all over the world in different cultures over thousands of years as if he just ran into them in Concord. I doubt that he fully understood the cultural contexts of what he read. This would have made it difficult for him to apply those models to nineteenth century Massachusetts. My greatest irritation with Emerson has to do with his adoption of the "great man" theory, which he probably applied to himself. To be sure, that has long been a theory among men and is still present in global and national politics. However, the idea had been suspect for quite some time, such as when Beethoven changed the name of his Third Symphony from Bonaparte to Sinfonia Eroica (Heroic Symphony) in 1804.

Summing up, I would say that Emerson was a nice guy who had an interesting life. It would have been fun to visit Emerson and Thoreau in Concord. But I think that an appropriate way to memorialize him would be with an excellent portrait – by Norman Rockwell.