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Ralph Waldo Emerson's Theoretical Poetics

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Ralph Waldo Emerson's Theoretical Poetics Double Writing: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Theoretical Poetics Benjamin Pickford Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2014 Abstract This thesis considers Ralph Waldo Emerson’s compositional process of ‘double writing’ as a distinctly theorised and intellectually coherent practice that generated discrete bodies of text: his private journals and notebooks; and the public essays, lectures, and poems. Throughout Emerson scholarship, critics tend to quote the two bodies without differentiation, often either neglecting the issue of their coexistence or asserting the priority of one form over the other. I contend instead that principles of self-reading, accretive reinscription, and a perpetuated relation to his own text condition Emerson’s ideas of poetic agency and the role of literature in broader socio-cultural contexts, to the extent that they become the preeminent factor in shaping his philosophical and literary aspirations. Focusing on the period 1836-50, from the beginning of the coexistence of public and private corpuses to the point at which he finalises his theory of textual relation, I trace the way in which Emerson’s ongoing textual investment first echoes—and later disrupts—aspirations to realise a philosophy of the subject steeped in the romantic tradition. The first part of the thesis examines the two textual bodies insofar as they reflect upon each other and on theories of composition, finding that Emerson gradually loses faith in the function of his public works up to 1842. In the second section of the thesis, I illustrate the continual revision his relation to text undergoes in the major works of the 1840s, as his compositional theory adapts to first conceptualise and then fulfil certain ethical obligations of the scholar and poet. I end by examining the poetic apotheosis figured by Poems (1847) and Representative Men (1850), which has little in common with his youthful aspirations, but which explains the ‘sage’-like mantle he accepted in American life and letters from the 1850s until his death in 1882. As well as revising conceptions of Emerson’s literary agency and the structure of his canon, this thesis offers an original reading of the theory of an author’s socio-cultural role in the mid nineteenth-century through the example of one of the era’s major figures. 2 Acknowledgements I am indebted to my supervisors, Dr Graham Thompson and Dr Matthew Pethers, and the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, for their guidance throughout the project. I am grateful to the librarians at Houghton Library, Harvard University, to Adrienne Donohue at Concord Museum, and to Ilhan Citak at the Linderman Library, Lehigh University, for their help with archival and special collections research. Funding for a research trip to Massachusetts was provided by the University of Nottingham School of Cultures, Languages, and Area Studies Travel Prize, and by a Research Training Support Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The degree was funded by an AHRC studentship. 3 Contents Abbreviations — 5 Introduction — Infinity in Askesis: Intention, Imperative, and Emerson’s Encounters with Form 6 Part One: ‘Knowing after a high, negative way’: The Formality of Emersonian Consciousness: 1836-1841 I — ‘Somehow he publishes it with solemn joy’: The Ends of Idealism and the Beginning of Writing in Nature (1836) 38 II — The Labours of Style: Reason’s Writing and the Method of an Elemental Language 66 III — A Poetics of Reiteration: Essays (1841) 118 Part Two: ‘Honour your place’: Form, Power, and Personas of Text: 1841- 1850 IV — ‘In for a mill, in for a million’: Essays: Second Series (1844) 150 V — Lions in Eden: Poems (1847) 211 Afterword — 254 Bibliography — 266 4 Abbreviations For regularly cited works the following abbreviations have been used parenthetically in the text, followed by the volume and page number. CW The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Albert R. Ferguson, Joseph Slater, Douglas Emory Wilson, Ronald A. Bosco and others, 10 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971-2013) EL The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Robert E. Spiller, Stephen E. Whicher, and Wallace E. Williams, 3 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1959-72) JMN The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by William H. Gilman, Ralph H. Orth and others, 16 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1960-82) L The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton, 10 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939 and 1990-5) 5 INTRODUCTION Infinity in Askesis: Intention, Imperative, and Emerson’s Encounters with Form Why need I volumes, if one word suffice? Emerson, ‘The Day’s Ration’ A written word is the choicest of relics. Thoreau, Walden When Edgar Allen Poe distinguished, in 1846’s ‘Philosophy of Composition’, between his own careful literary constructions and the ‘species of fine frenzy’ by which the ‘so- called poetry of the so-called Transcendentalists’ was supposed to have been produced, he identified a polarity which conditions a certain attitude in and toward American literature even to the present.1 While romantic models of inspired authorship by divine efflux have generally been given up, there is a persistent notion that Transcendentalism’s distinction depends on the conditions of spontaneity and organicity traditionally common in romantic theories of composition.2 This has much to do with the perceived qualities of the archetypal Transcendentalist text—the private journal—a form in which Ralph Waldo Emerson developed his ideas, sketched his lectures, poems, and essays, and generally used as a reflective medium of spontaneous expression and self-analysis throughout his career, famously advocating that his acolytes and friends do the same.3 As Thomas Meaney noted in a recent review article of new editions of writings by Emerson and Thoreau, the journals of such writers were filled with ‘vatic utterances and 1 Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, with Selections from his Critical Writings (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1992), pp. 978-87 (p. 979, 986). 2 A recent example of this is David Herd’s Enthusiast!, in which Transcendentalist spontaneity is argued to be the catalyst for a kind of American writing which bears a germ of the vigour of its composition, indicative of the kind of divine immediacy implied by the title. See Herd, Enthusiast!: Essays on Modern American Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 1-25. 3 See, for instance, the first line of Henry David Thoreau’s equally celebrated private journal: ‘“What are you doing now?” he [Emerson] asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry to-day’. Thoreau The Journal: 1837-1861, ed. by Damian Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2009), p. 3. 6 sudden gasps of meaning [that would become …] the recognisable American difference in literature, which never likes to be literary’. 4 The spontaneity and organicity observed in this method also constitute the basis of the other forms used by Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Through our access to extensive cross-referenced editions of journals and collected works we now know the precise extent to which Emerson, significantly more than Thoreau, reused his journals in the composition of works for public consumption. As such, his canon is a kind of ‘double writing’: a textual body which, when taken as a whole, contains many instances of partial or full repetition, of the reinscription and accretion of passages or lines in different places and different contexts. It appears thus to have a dual aspect: particular instances are either spontaneous or derived, primary or secondary. But idiosyncrasies in the process are widely ignored by critics. Meaney’s simple explanation is symptomatic: ‘By ladling out wholesale passages of their notebooks into their books and essays, they ensured this immediacy was not lost in their finished work’.5 Essentially, the distinction between spontaneity and derivation is fixed and mechanical. The apparent organicity of sections of the published works is actually the product of a cunning contrivance, and Poe’s mockery of their disingenuousness was justified. Yet while this explanation does not want for clarity, it simplifies a problem that ought to be seen as fundamental in Emerson’s compositional practice. After all, the extensive use of a private journal seems to imply a complex and multifaceted relation to text on the part of its author prior to or distinct from the impression their work has on a wider audience. And Emerson’s journal, as is well-known, is in no sense a mere ‘book of days’ in the way a conventional diary might be, but a complex system of volumes kept in different conditions, sometimes for different purposes, yet nevertheless held together by sophisticated indexing systems developed by the author. Meaney’s comment 4 Thomas Meaney, ‘Poisoned Arrows’, TLS, 5614 (2010), 3-4 (p. 4). 5 Meaney, p. 4. 7 simply distinguishes between ‘finished’ and unfinished work, and implies that Emerson’s sole audience was that for which the journal was mere rehearsal. Clearly, this is reductive. So what was the nature of that complex and multifaceted relation of Emerson with his own text, and what does it tell us about literary agency in a broader sense? The purpose of this thesis is to elaborate the system which I perceive to underlie Emerson’s double writing practice, and explore how and why the philosophical exigencies attending the apparently rather simple phenomena of self-reading and the revision or reinscription of one’s own past writing are actually of crucial significance, first for Emerson himself, but by extension for the writer as a social or ethical functionary.
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