Emerson: Facing the Ignoble World

Abstract

In a Journal entry for 6 October 1836, a month after Nature was published, Emerson wryly records: ‘Transcendentalism means says our accomplished Mrs B., with a wave of her hand, a little beyond.’¹ It is a view shared by Williams when he criticises Emerson for rising superior ‘into a world of thought’ (SE 155). However, this, as indeed Williams recognises, is hardly a full account of Transcendentalism and it is, I will argue, the focus on the world at hand which gives American Transcendentalism its unique identity. The emphasis on the need to express a truthful reconciliation between spirit and matter, Reason and Understanding, motivates this ‘school’ to engage mundane subjects as Emerson would be distracted by ‘puss’ in his crisis essay ‘Experience’ or Thoreau would be fascinated by a piece of rotten wood in The Maine Woods or that a ‘spear of summer grass’ would become what one critic terms a ‘constitutive metaphor’ for Whitman’s epic Leaves of Grass.²