Highlights

On the Poet-priest

Chapter 1

Emerson’s literary objective, then, was twofold: to unite “seer” and “sayer,” spiritual insight and beautiful expression. This ambivalence is reflected by the image of the poet-priest in the Address and pervades all his literary criticism. Like the ideal preacher, Emerson’s “Poet” must be the “reconciler” (W, III, 37), perfect in both inspiration and utterance (W, III, 37).

who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration

The raptures of prophecy, after all, had to be made intelligible to the understanding.

“Literature should be the handmaid of Religion,” considering it “simply another aspect of man’s attempt to better himself.

Henry Thoreau, were also closer to the purely artistic temperament than Emerson.

Thoreau had more of the prophetic spirit, but was wary of the oppressive moralizing in which the Transcendentalist ministers and (to a lesser extent) Emerson were prone to indulge. Though his own social and ethical writing is also in this vein, Thoreau liked at the same time to maintain an aesthetic distance from his own jeremiads: “What offends me most in my compositions is the moral element in them,” he once declared (JT, I, 316).

For some it became a life-style—for better or for worse;

It followed from Transcendentalism’s central principle, the affirmation of man’s ability to experience God firsthand. This is a doctrine which has to be communicated more by re-creation than analysis..

But because spiritual experience is inherently a nonrational thing, indeed a denial in itself of reason and logic, it will not bear to be talked about for very long in the language of the understanding, as Emerson noted. To make it convincing demands all the resources of which language is capable. Sensing this, Emerson wisely accompanied his call for an original relation to the universe (in Nature) with a call for original use of language.

being cultivated intellectuals, for the most part they chose to express this protest in a literary way.

In short, by the 1830s the state of liberal religion in New England was such as to disaffect a significant number of young men and women of altruistic and/or aesthetic bent who just a generation or so before would have been able to find enough satisfaction in conventional piety, for whom art and personal rapport with nature were more uplifting than sermons and church worship and for whom writing, lecturing, and social action were more rewarding and effectual when done outside the church than within. This was the state of mind underlying Transcendentalism and the vision of the self-reliant poet-priest.

There was no institutionalized outlet for the ambitions of the Transcendentalists, no socially recognized name for what they wanted to do. They were going through the most severe crisis of identity (“vocation” was their word for it)

it was a favorite Transcendentalist pastime to brood about one’s vocation.

The answers they hit upon were always metaphorical and grandiose.

Such exuberance had its tragic side, in the long run. “All Emerson’s young men,” Sherman Paul points out, “had trouble in choosing careers; indeed, in looking back over that generation one finds in the wake of Transcendentalism a series of personal failures.”

Almost all the Transcendentalists with literary aspirations fell into this category. Emerson encouraged Alcott, Channing, Very, Thoreau, and Fuller in their writing, but if anything his influence kept them from literary success, at least as the world measures it. This was partly because he encouraged them to be uncompromisingly high-minded, partly because his view of the literary vocation was as vague as it was extravagant. 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.” This was an eloquent summation of the relationship between his poetic and pietistic impulses, but it did not readily translate into a practical program for making a living.

Thoreau, following in Emerson’s footsteps, complained about having 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” (JT, II, 467).

When the Transcendentalists did achieve literary success on their own terms, they almost inevitably fell short of popular acclaim.

In most cases, therefore, the Transcendentalists made their way in the world only to the extent that they abandoned the ideal of the poet-priest in favor of such institutionalized roles as minister, journalist, surveyor, and housewife. Lecturing in the lyceum was as close as they came to converting a truly transcendental mode of utterance into a popular success.

they were also in a sense seeking to preserve the Puritan conception of the literary life in an era when that conception was fast becoming extinct. In picturing the role of the Poet in essentially religious terms, the Transcendentalists sought, in effect, to subsume their aesthetic impulses within the traditional theocentric framework

the sort of literary vocation they had in mind cannot be easily pigeonholed. They themselves were vague about what they wanted, and what they wanted was not simply aesthetic or spiritual but a combination of the two. To a modern reader it may well seem that their criticism and their art were vitiated by the intermixture, but the reverse is actually more true. The view of the artist’s vocation as profoundly religious, for which the Unitarian movement had prepared the way, was a liberating conception for them. If it helps account for their shortcomings, it is also a key to their power.

Chapter 2

All Transcendentalist attempts to describe how art is to be created, and the impact which it should make upon its audience, begin and end with the idea of inspiration.

Nor was Emerson totally spontaneous when it came to his own writing. No method of composition could have been less spontaneous, indeed, than his practice of piecing together mosaics from journal to lecture to essay.

The same common sense, underneath a rhetoric of inspiration, can be found in all the other Transcendentalists with any claim to literary importance

They were all enamored of the idea of inspiration, and hastened to ascribe as much as possible to it, even the literary grubwork.

But as refined and sensitive people, they demanded satisfaction from the finished product. Discipline, then, was a hidden but genuine part of the Transcendentalist aesthetic.

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.

bear in mind this equation of creativity with spiritual or intellectual fulfilment if we are to understand not only the theoretical importance they attached to inspiration but also their practical attention to craftsmanship.

all men have direct access to the deity.

They viewed spiritual fulfilment in terms of human, natural excellence rather than in terms of supernatural intervention.

The true mystical experience, that is, is a transfiguration from within and not a message or thunderbolt from without. But even this sort of experience is rarely recorded by the Transcendentalists.

Thoreau’s writings are almost as unmystical.

For the most part Thoreau’s writing conveys the sense of a highly self-conscious and rational intelligence.

despite what the Transcendentalists said about inspiration, they were nearly as Unitarian in their emotional restraint as they were in their distrust of particular providences.

Theirs was a highly intellectual, almost a hypothetical mysticism, more talked about than felt.

“The spiritual life,” another Transcendentalist minister agreed, “demands, rather contains in itself, the germ which produces . . . utterance of word, utterance of deed."

after the late 1830s, Emerson’s praise of inspiration actually gets more effusive the more he complains about his own lack of it. As he felt his powers of perception wane, inspiration seemed progressively more wonderful.”

References

Buell, L. (1973). Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Cornell University Press.