Abstract
The Sage of Concord attracted like minds. Even now his way of thinking has not lost its power to generate enthusiasm, as in this gloss by Sherman Paul:
By scholar, he meant “intellectual.” He meant the free spirits, the “genius” and the artist, whose stock-in-trade is in themselves and their perception of truth. The times call for apostles of Being, not defenders of Seeming; and against the manipulators of masses and matter, he put the man of ideas. He believed the truth—spiritual power—would prevail; not by itself, however, but through man, in his resolute heroism, in his daring to use ideas as weapons in the face of a deaf and hostile society.
Mr. Emerson is the most American of our writers. The Idea of America … appears in him with great prominence. We mean the idea of personal freedom, of the dignity and value of human nature, the superiority of a man to the accidents of a man. Emerson is the most republican of republicans, the most protestant of dissenters. … The most democratic of democrats, no disciple of the old regime is better mannered, for it is only the vulgar democrat or aristocrat who flings his follies in your face.
—Theodore Parker
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Theodore Parker, “The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Massachusetts Quarterly Review, 3 (March 1850): 205–206.
Sherman Paul, Repossessing and Renewing: Essays in the Green American Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 1–2.
See David Morse, American Romanticism (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1987), 119–168;
and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Emerson on the Scholar (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992) for surveys of the Emersonian idea of the scholar.
See Jay Grossman, Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 116–160, for a searching account of Emerson’s class-consciousness as it bears on his notion of the scholar.
Taylor Stoehr, Nay-Saying in Concord: Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau (Hamden: Archon Books, 1979) makes a spirited attempt to date to defend the radicalism of the scholarly position.
Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1965), 45–46; Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 20n.
Henry David Thoreau, The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, Walter Harding and Carl Bode, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 19–20.
Cary Wolfe, The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 79–86, argues that Emerson developed his radical individualism in response to the spectacle of homogeneity presented by the Jacksonian masses. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 307–352, argues that this same ideological invention was a response to utopian socialism.
Thoreau, Journal, vol. 1, 393. Lydia Maria Child, Review of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden by Henry David Thoreau, National Anti-Slavery Standard (December 16, 1854): 3.
Frederic Henry Hedge, “The Art of Life—The Scholar’s Calling,” Dial, 1, no. 2 (October 1840): 176, 180.
Charvat, Profession of Authorship, 64. Kenneth S. Sacks, Understanding Emerson: The American Scholar and His Struggle for Self-Reliance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 2, 2, 4.
Sam McGuire Worley, Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), 125. Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 4, 356–357.
Orestes Brownson, “Review of An Oration Delivered before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838 by Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Boston Quarterly Review, 2, no. 1 (January 1839): 13, 9, 10.
Orestes Brownson, “Brook Farm,” The United States Democratic Review, 11, no. 53 (November 1842): 482–483.
Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 204.
Laura Dassow Walls, Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 4, 10, 4. For a valuable account of how the American Romantics “invoked nature as the ground of value (both economic and moral),”
see Howard Horwitz, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–56.
Copyright information
© 2005 Lance Newman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Newman, L. (2005). Transcendentalist Reformers, Scholars, and Nature. In: Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973535_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973535_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53022-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-7353-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)