Ralph Waldo Emerson, Orestes Brownson, and Transcendentalism

Abstract

Enthusiasm for Wordsworth was not universal. More than one reviewer used the appearance of Yarrow as an opportunity to wonder whether there was anything authentically democratic about the poet at all:

At the time when [Wordsworth] came forward … to offer his productions, the world was storming with passion. Political strife was consuming and overwhelming everything. … Our poet, as if from another state of being, and like a bird, singing above a field of battle, published verses with such unpropitious titles as “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” “The Female Vagrant,” [and] “The Thorn.” … How could the world regard, but with disgust, a man who, while war was raging abroad, and revolutionary excitement at home, could nestle in the chimney corner and listen to the singing of a tea-kettle.

A young man, named Ralph Waldo Emerson, a son of my once loved friend William Emerson, and a classmate of my lamented son George, after failing in the every-day avocations of a Unitarian preacher and schoolmaster, starts a new doctrine of transcendentalism, declares all the old revelations superannuated and worn-out, and announces the approach of new revelations and prophecies. Garrison and the non-resistant abolitionists, Brownson and the Marat Democrats, phrenology and animal magnetism, all come in, furnishing each some plausible rascality as an ingredient for the bubbling cauldron of religion and politics.

—John Quincy Adams