I chiefly know Emerson as an aphorist, so it was mildly surprising to read how his contemporaries viewed his Lyceum lectures in much the same light. "A poet, not a philosopher" is the general reaction to his early sallies. Emerson was first-rate, from a family of first-rate men, and everyone knew it. His intellectual promise was generally conceded, but his offerings were faulted for lacking in coherence, notable mostly for brilliant _bon mots_. Emerson reproaches himself in his journals for not tackling the big issues of the day. When things finally click in his mind and he produces _The American Scholar_, the impracticality of its prescriptions is not diminished by its ringing tones.
Yet I suspect that Emerson's slipperiness contributed to his works' staying power. If he had constructed a tidy, interlaced, balanced philosophical system, then he would have been comprehended, absorbed, and done with long ago. But as his best sentences urge the reader on, rather than drawing a map, they continue to inspire down to this day. "Hitch your wagon to a star", indeed.
The book is valuable for introducing the reader to the Bostonian intelligentsia of the 1820s and 1830s, and for reproducing this stage in Emerson's career. Even Thomas Carlyle makes a cameo appearance, as Emerson's moral and financial support helps establish the Scot's reputation in the U.S. I learned a lot--and will probably learn a lot more if I make time to re-read this book. It's the sort of work that makes you want to go and study up, so that you can come back and tackle it again; it's that good.
A seminal figure in American literature and philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson is considered the apostle of self-reliance, fully alive within his ideas and disarmingly confident about his innermost thoughts. Yet the circumstances around "The American Scholar" oration--his first great public address and the most celebrated talk in American academic history--suggest a different Emerson. In Understanding Emerson, Kenneth Sacks draws on a wealth of contemporary correspondence and diaries, much of it previously unexamined, to reveal a young intellectual struggling to define himself and his principles.
Caught up in the fierce dispute between his Transcendentalist colleagues and Harvard, the secular bastion of Boston Unitarianism and the very institution he was invited to honor with the annual Phi Beta Kappa address, Emerson agonized over compromising his sense of self-reliance while simultaneously desiring to meet the expectations of his friends. Putting aside self-doubts and a resistance to controversy, in the end he produced an oration of extraordinary power and authentic vision that propelled him to greater awareness of social justice, set the standard for the role of the intellectual in America, and continues to point the way toward educational reform. In placing this singular event within its social and philosophical context, Sacks opens a window into America's nineteenth-century intellectual landscape as well as documenting the evolution of Emerson's idealism.
Engagingly written, this book, which includes the complete text of "The American Scholar," allows us to appreciate fully Emerson's brilliant rebuke of the academy and his insistence that the most important truths derive not from books and observation but from intuition within each of us. Rising defiantly before friend and foe, Emerson triumphed over his hesitations, redirecting American thought and pedagogy and creating a personal tale of quiet heroism.