RALPH WALDO

EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) is probably one of the most famous, most eloquent, and least read figures in American literature. He was a poet, a preacher, a visionary, and an itinerant lecturer; he left behind a remarkable series of essays, lectures, notebooks, and journals; and yet he is best known for his influence on those who followed him: Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens.

Textbooks most often introduce Emerson as the central figure in American transcendentalism. He does not, however, have to be read as a representative philosopher; to do so, in fact, violates his own feisty individualism and his struggle to stay free of schools of thought and the pressure of received opinion. He can be read for the pleasure of his unusual style of speaking and thinking and for the force of his immediate argument. The essay that follows, “The American Scholar,” is about education, including university education, and it says some rather surprising things, including the following about the use of books (like the one you are reading right now): “Books are for the scholar’s idle times,” and “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.” It is a shame to think that the only way to read Emerson is as an example of what people once thought (and, in fact, it is wrong to think that in the nineteenth century most people thought or said such things). It is possible, alternatively, to read Emerson as a person with something to say to American scholars at today’s colleges and universities.

“The American Scholar” was presented as a lecture to the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa on August 31, 1837. It has been called “the most influential address ever made before an American college audience,” and America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.” It was also called “misty, dreamy, and unintelligible.” Emerson’s prose is not orderly, straightforward, or systematic. It does not easily or quickly connect one thing to another but puts the responsibility in the hands of the reader — in your hands — which, according to one of the essay’s arguments, is exactly where it belongs.