Jeffrey Einboden
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199397808
- eISBN:
- 9780199397822
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199397808.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Islam
The final chapter, reaching up to the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, mapping the wide expanse between his public image and private practice. Emerson, a ...
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The final chapter, reaching up to the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, mapping the wide expanse between his public image and private practice. Emerson, a celebrated icon of American exceptionalism and philosopher of American Romanticism, is here revealed also as America’s most prolific translator of Islamic verse, rendering more than two thousand lines of Persian poetry through German sources. Scribbled through diaries, letters, even on the backs of envelopes, Emerson’s early appeal to the Qur’ān, and his later translations of Sufi poets—especially Muḥammad Shamsuddīn Ḥāfiẓ—are shown to have shaped Emerson’s own poetic identity, while also promoting his posthumous legacy.Less
The final chapter, reaching up to the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, mapping the wide expanse between his public image and private practice. Emerson, a celebrated icon of American exceptionalism and philosopher of American Romanticism, is here revealed also as America’s most prolific translator of Islamic verse, rendering more than two thousand lines of Persian poetry through German sources. Scribbled through diaries, letters, even on the backs of envelopes, Emerson’s early appeal to the Qur’ān, and his later translations of Sufi poets—especially Muḥammad Shamsuddīn Ḥāfiẓ—are shown to have shaped Emerson’s own poetic identity, while also promoting his posthumous legacy.
John Gatta
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2005
- ISBN:
- 9780195165050
- eISBN:
- 9780199835140
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0195165055.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a ...
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By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a source of revelation largely superseding the Christian scriptures. Both literary artists and Hudson River painters highlighted their impressions of the sacred sublime in American landscapes. And as civilized settlements continued to replace the older freedom of life on the frontier, James Fenimore Cooper dramatized the problematic ethical consequences of this change in his Leatherstocking novels, above all in The Pioneers. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of the nonhuman world as divine “cosmos,” or “beauty” is most memorably presented in his book Nature (1836), which celebrates the intersection between Nature and Civilization he discovered on the “common” space of a village green in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson’s poem “The Adirondacs,” which describes a camping excursion interrupted by news of laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable, underscores the point that no part of nature could henceforth be wholly removed from human presence or influence.Less
By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a source of revelation largely superseding the Christian scriptures. Both literary artists and Hudson River painters highlighted their impressions of the sacred sublime in American landscapes. And as civilized settlements continued to replace the older freedom of life on the frontier, James Fenimore Cooper dramatized the problematic ethical consequences of this change in his Leatherstocking novels, above all in The Pioneers. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of the nonhuman world as divine “cosmos,” or “beauty” is most memorably presented in his book Nature (1836), which celebrates the intersection between Nature and Civilization he discovered on the “common” space of a village green in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson’s poem “The Adirondacs,” which describes a camping excursion interrupted by news of laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable, underscores the point that no part of nature could henceforth be wholly removed from human presence or influence.
Andrea Knutson
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195370928
- eISBN:
- 9780199870769
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195370928.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Chapter 3 examines the ways that Emerson aestheticizes the conversion process through the literary style of his essays and Nature, thereby inviting his readers to experience the effects of ...
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Chapter 3 examines the ways that Emerson aestheticizes the conversion process through the literary style of his essays and Nature, thereby inviting his readers to experience the effects of “transparency” in their search for meaning between the words, sentences, and paragraphs of his work. It looks at the ways that the currents of transcendentalism and natural philosophy, the idea of reason, and his visit to the Jardin des Plantes in 1833 informed his conceptualization of the workings of consciousness and argues that Emerson fosters a method of thinking, or habit of mind, through a style that compels readers to “minister” to themselves, to become natural philosophers of the soul in their search for meaning and stability in the universe. This chapter builds on the previous two by placing Emerson in line with Shepard and Edwards who saw the work of personal and cultural renewal as a matter of converting semantics and argues that in Emerson’s work we see (or experience) this connection most overtly in his troping of language because it provokes disorientation and the need to attach new meaning to particular words and ideas, the ministerial imperative taken on by Shepard after the Puritan migration to New England.Less
Chapter 3 examines the ways that Emerson aestheticizes the conversion process through the literary style of his essays and Nature, thereby inviting his readers to experience the effects of “transparency” in their search for meaning between the words, sentences, and paragraphs of his work. It looks at the ways that the currents of transcendentalism and natural philosophy, the idea of reason, and his visit to the Jardin des Plantes in 1833 informed his conceptualization of the workings of consciousness and argues that Emerson fosters a method of thinking, or habit of mind, through a style that compels readers to “minister” to themselves, to become natural philosophers of the soul in their search for meaning and stability in the universe. This chapter builds on the previous two by placing Emerson in line with Shepard and Edwards who saw the work of personal and cultural renewal as a matter of converting semantics and argues that in Emerson’s work we see (or experience) this connection most overtly in his troping of language because it provokes disorientation and the need to attach new meaning to particular words and ideas, the ministerial imperative taken on by Shepard after the Puritan migration to New England.
Charles Capper
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195396324
- eISBN:
- 9780199852703
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195396324.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America’s most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Margaret Fuller ...
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Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America’s most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Margaret Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history. In this book, Volume II, the author illuminates Fuller’s “public years”, focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. He brings to life Fuller’s dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation’s culture and politics. The author also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller’s friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to many others.Less
Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America’s most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Margaret Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history. In this book, Volume II, the author illuminates Fuller’s “public years”, focusing on her struggles to establish her identity as an influential intellectual woman in the Romantic Age. He brings to life Fuller’s dramatic mixture of inward struggles, intimate social life, and deep engagements with the movements of her time. He describes how Fuller struggled to reconcile high avant-garde cultural ideals and Romantic critical methods with democratic social and political commitments, and how she strove to articulate a cosmopolitan vision for her nation’s culture and politics. The author also offers fresh and often startlingly new treatments of Fuller’s friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Giuseppe Mazzini, in addition to many others.
Matthew Mutter
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195342536
- eISBN:
- 9780199867042
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195342536.003.0004
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the ...
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This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the “moral sentiment.” Matthew Mutter argues that this dual expectation is made possible by a radicalization of the Puritan project of integrating the sacred and the secular. This radicalization ultimately placed the burden of sacred order on the vision of the perceiving individual, which in turn diminished the significance of outward social and political arrangements. Attention is given to Emerson's misapprehension of the actual trends in nineteenth‐century American religious life, to the differences between Emerson's prophetic stance and those of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lincoln, and to the effects of the Civil War on Emerson's thought and American public religion in general. The conclusion looks at Emerson's legacy in American religious history.Less
This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the “moral sentiment.” Matthew Mutter argues that this dual expectation is made possible by a radicalization of the Puritan project of integrating the sacred and the secular. This radicalization ultimately placed the burden of sacred order on the vision of the perceiving individual, which in turn diminished the significance of outward social and political arrangements. Attention is given to Emerson's misapprehension of the actual trends in nineteenth‐century American religious life, to the differences between Emerson's prophetic stance and those of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lincoln, and to the effects of the Civil War on Emerson's thought and American public religion in general. The conclusion looks at Emerson's legacy in American religious history.
Paul Grimstad
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199874071
- eISBN:
- 9780199345465
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199874071.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter looks in detail at the development of Emerson’s method of composition, and links this to different accounts of experience, from Unitarian empiricism to Kant’s transcendental idealism. It ...
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This chapter looks in detail at the development of Emerson’s method of composition, and links this to different accounts of experience, from Unitarian empiricism to Kant’s transcendental idealism. It concludes by looking closely at Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche.Less
This chapter looks in detail at the development of Emerson’s method of composition, and links this to different accounts of experience, from Unitarian empiricism to Kant’s transcendental idealism. It concludes by looking closely at Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche.
Randall Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195313925
- eISBN:
- 9780199787753
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195313925.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century ...
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The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.Less
The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.
Kathleen Verduin
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199584628
- eISBN:
- 9780191739095
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584628.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Poetry
This chapter considers how Dante as national poet was presented as a model for the American artist, and how Ralph Waldo Emerson's reading of the Italian poet reflected, on the one hand, a will to ...
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This chapter considers how Dante as national poet was presented as a model for the American artist, and how Ralph Waldo Emerson's reading of the Italian poet reflected, on the one hand, a will to assert national distinction and independence, and on the other, an impulse toward cultural continuity.Less
This chapter considers how Dante as national poet was presented as a model for the American artist, and how Ralph Waldo Emerson's reading of the Italian poet reflected, on the one hand, a will to assert national distinction and independence, and on the other, an impulse toward cultural continuity.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195181005
- eISBN:
- 9780199851010
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195181005.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Pragmatist poetics offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the rhetoric, the obsessions, the tactics, and the ambivalences that operate in experimental American poetry, especially with regard to ...
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Pragmatist poetics offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the rhetoric, the obsessions, the tactics, and the ambivalences that operate in experimental American poetry, especially with regard to the three major themes: community, individualism, and an obsession with flux and mobility. However, unlike most other recent accounts of the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatism on American poetry, this chapter explores how this lineage extends beyond the modernist generation. The chapter's intention here is not to attempt to define or explain the enormous wealth and complexity of pragmatism itself, but rather to explore a set of far-reaching tropes, concepts, and paradoxes embedded in American philosophy that the poets perpetuate and challenge. It is worth mentioning here that this congruence between Emerson, pragmatism, and experimental poetry, “New American Poetry” has continued to the present moment.Less
Pragmatist poetics offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the rhetoric, the obsessions, the tactics, and the ambivalences that operate in experimental American poetry, especially with regard to the three major themes: community, individualism, and an obsession with flux and mobility. However, unlike most other recent accounts of the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and pragmatism on American poetry, this chapter explores how this lineage extends beyond the modernist generation. The chapter's intention here is not to attempt to define or explain the enormous wealth and complexity of pragmatism itself, but rather to explore a set of far-reaching tropes, concepts, and paradoxes embedded in American philosophy that the poets perpetuate and challenge. It is worth mentioning here that this congruence between Emerson, pragmatism, and experimental poetry, “New American Poetry” has continued to the present moment.
Sharon Cameron
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226091310
- eISBN:
- 9780226091334
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226091334.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
In his essay “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asks: “Where do we find ourselves?” The place Emerson finds himself is one where no light is (“night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree”). And ...
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In his essay “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asks: “Where do we find ourselves?” The place Emerson finds himself is one where no light is (“night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree”). And it is more oppressive than that because he can't see where he is and he can't see his way out. What he attests to is stupor. In the essay's most frequently cited passage, Emerson states: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.” True to the double pattern of assertion thus far, the grammatical reference for “this evanescence” is not only the life of the child but also the evasiveness of the grief occasioned by the child's death. This chapter argues that what is at stake in “Experience” is not a question of logic but rather a question of the elegiac, and that Emerson is creating a powerful and systematic representation of grief.Less
In his essay “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson asks: “Where do we find ourselves?” The place Emerson finds himself is one where no light is (“night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree”). And it is more oppressive than that because he can't see where he is and he can't see his way out. What he attests to is stupor. In the essay's most frequently cited passage, Emerson states: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.” True to the double pattern of assertion thus far, the grammatical reference for “this evanescence” is not only the life of the child but also the evasiveness of the grief occasioned by the child's death. This chapter argues that what is at stake in “Experience” is not a question of logic but rather a question of the elegiac, and that Emerson is creating a powerful and systematic representation of grief.
