ABSTRACT
This study explores fundamental relationships existing in the works of two great American Scholars of the 19th century: Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It argues that,S“ong of Myself”, the poetry collection in Whitman’s major literary work Leaves of Grass, echoes or re-emphasizes some of Emerson’s significant ideological and philosophical beliefs. Ralph Waldo Emerson, recognized as the founder of America’s transcendentalist movement, was a key figure in America’s intellectual and literary revolution in the 19th century. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s publication of “Nature” in 1836 began a process of creating a new condition of American thinking, severed from European cultural and intellectual influences. 1 In “The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance”, Emerson called for an original American literature that truly depicted the American taste and condition.
His philosophy of “trusting in one’s self”, breaking away from theological and institutional dogmas and believing in the “divine” human personality, influenced other writers like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau just to mention a few. Like Emerson’s first work “Nature” (1836), “Self-Reliance” (1841) was recognized for its peculiar character as a work of social commentary, espousing ideals of ‘how men ought to live’ while deemphasizing the asphyxiating pressures of external authority. The study illustrates the inter-textual ties and influences between Whitman’s long poem “Song of Myself” and aspects of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s major literary works. The study investigates this relationship by examining the thematic and philosophical concerns expressed in Whitman’s poetry and juxtaposes it with its literary predecessor/precursor rooted in a selection of Emerson’s major transcendentalist literary works. Employing T.S Eliot’s theory of influence in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) as a framework to interpret the echoes, the study challenges
1 Sections of this abstract taken from an abstract posted on academia.edu under the title “Echoes of Emerson in Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”.” Also authored by the researcher of this thesis.
https://www.academia.edu/6185657/ Echoes_of_Emerson_in_Walt_Whitmans_Song_of_Myself_-ABSTRACT
traditional notions of influence that privilege the precursor influence as a “standard” to evaluate the later artist’s work and concludes that although Emerson is echoed in Whitman’s text, the relationship of influence between these two writers (per a critical literary interpretation of texts) is not one in which the precursor is seen in the simplistic light of “flowing into”, or sending forth “power or virtue” to the later artist. Rather, the relationship of influence is a sort of symbiosis in which the precursor and the later texts mutually transform and reinforce each other.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE…………………………………………………………………………………………… i
DECLARATION…………………………………………………………………………………….. ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT………………………………………………………………………. iii
DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………………………… iv
ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………….. v-vi
TABLE OF CONTENT……………………………………………………………………… vii-viii
INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1
III. America in the 19th Century……………………………………………………………………………… 6
- Objectives of the Study…………………………………………………………………………………….. 10
- Significance of the Study………………………………………………………………………………. 10
- Delimitations of the Study……………………………………………………………………………… 11
- Theoretical Framework………………………………………………………………………………….. 12
- Methodology……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 13
- Thesis Structure……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 14
CHAPTER ONE………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 15
LITERATURE REVIEW………………………………………………………………………………………….. 15
- INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 15
- Emerson’s Ethos……………………………………………………………………………….. 37
CHAPTER TWO……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 43
THE SONG OF HIMSELF: WHITMAN’S ETHOS……………………………………………………… 43
CHAPTER THREE………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 77
ECHOES: ARGUMENTS ON ECCLESIAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONDUCT………….. 77
CHAPTER FOUR…………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 98
ECHOES: THE “I” AND NATURE…………………………………………………………………………… 98
CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 113
Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship (Emerson, “Nature”, 7).
INTRODUCTION
This section acts as a background to the study that highlights the very distinct biographies of the two great American literary artists being studied. It provides a description of the tenuous social and political climate in which both writers produced their works and hint at the motivations behind their works.
A study of the literary works of both Whitman and Emerson would reveal a deep concern for “the human personality” (struggles and identity; weaknesses and capabilities), a preoccupation with the enchantment of nature and the comfort it assures and an examination of the nature of religion (dogmas and abuses). Both writers were concerned about America; the social and political condition of the American state in the 19th century was an issue of popular debate among writers at the time.
Whitman’s poetry, very much like Emerson’s literary works, employs or evokes images of the American mainland. In “Song of Myself”, the poet calls up names of American states like California, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas and Tennessee just to mention a few. Emerson’s major treatises like “Self- Reliance”, “The American Scholar” and “The Divinity School address”, mostly in the form of orations delivered at public gatherings, address pressing issues facing the American social and political order. Both writers acknowledge their citizenship in their literary works and demonstrate their avowed commitment to correct the ills plaguing the American society. For instance, both Whitman and Emerson were against the institution of slavery which was still being practised in 19th century American society; they were against the restrictive and stifling dogmas of institutions like the church and the
universities and instead preached the virtues of “self- expression”, “free-will” and “non-conformity”.
The transcendentalist movement which emerged in the 19th century could be seen as a needed response to particular social issues the American society was facing at the time. Both writers contributed immensely to the intellectual and literary revolution that transformed the fortunes of American society. While the title of Whitman’s text (“Song of Myself”) may seem to suggest a preoccupation with “the self”, it expresses or reveals profound comments about the nature of the ideal collective American state; one that transcends the individual; that moves away from dogmatism and blind worship of the past to make way for an embracing of intuition; one that reflects the truly liberated American state.
I. Biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 25, 1803, son of Ruth Haskins and Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian Minister (Richardson, 18). He was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood; the others were William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley and Charles. Three other children- Phebe, John Clarke and Mary Caroline- died in childhood (Baker, 3). Emerson was raised by his mother, with the help of his aunt, Mary Moody, when his father died from stomach cancer less than two weeks before Emerson’s eighth birthday. Some accounts of Emerson’s biography reveal that Aunt Mary Moody had a profound influence on Emerson’s intellectual growth. Mary Moody Emerson was known not only as her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “earliest and best teacher,” but a lso as a “spirited and original genius in her
own right”. In one of his later lectures, Emerson considered her presence in his life a “blessing which nothing else in education could supply”.
After studying at Harvard and teaching for a brief time, Emerson entered the ministry. He was appointed to the O ld Second Church in his native city, but soon became an unwilling preacher. Unable in conscience to administer the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper after the death of Ellen Louisa Tucker, his nineteen-year-old wife, of tuberculosis, Emerson resigned his pastorate in 1831. As he wrote, “This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it” (Packer, 39). As one Emerson scholar has pointed out, “Doffing the decent black of the pastor, he was free to choose the gown of the lecturer and teacher, of the thinker not confined within the limits of an institution or a tradition” (Ferguson). Some accounts of Emerson’s life, have highlighted this moment as a significant moment in Emerson’s ‘coming of age’ and subsequent criticism of institutions that stifled any form of personal experience and instead branded any such attempts at “thinking outside the box” as rebellious and discordant. Writing in his journal in June 1832, Emerson expressed thus: “I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.”
Emerson became known for challenging traditional thought. In 1835, he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson, and settled in Concord, Massachusetts. Known in the local literary circle as “The Sage of Concord,” Emerson became the chief spokesman for Transcendentalism, the American philosophic and literary movement. Centred in New England during the 19th century, Transcendentalism was a reaction against scientific rationalism. Emerson’s motto “trust thyself” was viewed as a statement of
non-conformity and a reliance on intuition as the only way to comprehend reality. Emerson’s other volumes include Poems (1847), Representative Men, The Conduct of Life (1860), and English Traits (1865). His best-known addresses are “The American Scholar” (1837) and “The Divinity School Address”, which he delivered before the graduates of the Harvard Divinity School, shocking Boston’s conservative clergymen with his descriptions of the divinity of man and the humanity of Jesus. Emerson discounted Biblical miracles and proclaimed that, while Jesus was a great man, he was not God: historical Christianity, he said, had turned Jesus into a “demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo”. His comments outraged the establishment and the general Protestant community. For this, he was denounced as an atheist and‘poisoner’ of young men’s minds (Buell, 161). His address to a Harvard audience in 1837, published with the title “The American Scholar”, has been called America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.” Emerson said, toward the end of his writing career, “I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.” Emerson is believed to be one of the foremost American scholars to have conceptualised the philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism, with the support of such key adherents as Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickson and Henry David Thoreau. He referred to “the splendid labyrinth of one’s own perceptions”–in the face of society’s pressures on people to conform in both thought and deed. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1842 lecture “The Transcendentalist”:
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic,
personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own. (96)
Transcendentalism thus evolved as a literary philosophical movement that had as its ultimate aim, the rejection of all forms of ‘restrictive’ dogmatism, with an appeal to generating a form of self-awareness and belief, liberating the human psyche from conventionalism in order to facilitate full and genuine expressionism. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds…A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men” (71).
Ralph Waldo Emerson died of pneumonia in 1882.
II. Biography of Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman was born on Long Island, New York in 1819 to a small farmer who later moved to Brooklyn to become a carpenter. As a young boy he attended school only briefly. After leaving school he trained as a journeyman printer, part-time farmer, schoolteacher, carpenter and later as a journalist. In his spare time he travelled widely in the United States. A self- educated man, Whitman read widely on his own, spending whole days in libraries across New York. Ultimately he learnt how to express himself in his private notebooks and began writing poetry vigorously throughout the 1850s and 1860s. In January 1873 Whitman suffered the first of a series of strokes that would leave him a semi-invalid for the rest of his life.
Whitman once said of his works: “I was simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.” Whitman’s first major work, Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855 and contained 12 poems. In this first edition of Leaves of Grass published at the poet’s own expense, the Preface described America as “the greatest poem… What I tell I tell precisely for what it is.” Whitman’s concern in his literary works was with the ordinary people of America. He says in the Preface: “Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency.” In Leaves of Grass, Whitman concerns himself with the unity of body and soul. The ‘I’ in the poems is a visionary in search of himself in others.
He wrote mainly about America, its people and democracy, hence he was somewhat regarded as a national poet. Unlike other poets of his generation, he was not a university graduate, and therefore rather than looked to English poetry for his sources and inspiration, he looked to himself and his environment. He refuses to look back to the past and the classics and makes his own rules to operate by, as represented in his indulgent use of the “I” which affirms the sort of uninhibited self- love portrayed in “Song of Myself”. Whitman’s patriotism and love for America is very much like Emerson’s devotion to the American state; they both possessed and represented the need for an ideological re-orientation of the American people that would ensure that America moved away from European conventionalism.
III. America in the 19th Century
A number of key events characterized the social and political milieu of America in the 19th century. Issues of immigration, poverty, labour, women struggling for a place in
this period and issues relating to slavery characterized this period of American life. All American peoples, except for Native Americans have emigrated from other countries. Most of the early immigrants came from the British Isles. Immigrants followed from every European country. Immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Scandinavia played key roles. Blacks brought from Africa as slaves were also significant in this influx. Important immigration also came from China and Japan. Edgar Lee Masters in his book The Living Thoughts of Ralph Waldo Emerson, explains that Emerson was engaged in a fight against the perception of America as a province, a mere feeding-ground for merchants.
He was against conservatism in religion, politics and business. It was strange that a people fresh from revolution with a broad fertile land and unmeasured opportunities should engraft upon themselves the tyrannies and the superstitions of a Europe that was really defunct. But Emerson found…that there was little independence of mind in America, and little freedom of discussion. He knew that great writers and thinkers could not exist in America without the freedom of opinion. And for the purposes of his emphatic reaction to repressed conditions it was well enough that he was born and lived in New England where the theocracy of Puritanism had survived the Revolution and was stronger than ever. (Edgar Lee Masters, pg. 18)
Edgar Lee Masters further explains that New England at the time that Emerson emerged was much like his own town in Illinois.
Self-repression was a feature of the Puritan religion, and distrust of nature was something enjoined upon the mind and heart. That Emerson freed himself of these restrictions and wrote in the essays and poems the wisdom by which that was done fitted him to publish declarations of intellectual independence for his countrymen. Who else really did this?
America, when he came on the scene, was conservative in religion and business and in politics…’ (Edgar Lee Masters, pg. 16)
No assessment of America’s developmental history would be accurate without highlighting the immense contributions this influx of people of diverse origins had on America’s growth. Other notable developments within this period include America’s gradual rise to the status of an industrialized nation and noteworthy experiments of the democratic machinery of governance. America in the 19th century evolved from a largely agricultural society to the world’s most important industrial power. Bountiful natural resources, a foundation of English law, a free enterprise system, an effective public education system, and immigration combined to make America potentially the most powerful country in the world. Other historians focus on the negative: the concentration of wealth, child and female labour, unfair and unsafe working conditions, and other social problems.
Otto, in trying to describe the social and political circumstances in which Emerson and Whitman wrote, explains: “The intention of American democracy was d istinctly stated in the country’s motto, e pluribus unum (from many, one), which suggested that America was one community created with the equal efforts of its numerous individuals. But that ideal was not blossoming due to the growing emphasis on individual economic advancement. America had many citizens but those many were not working towards one true democracy.”2
Expressing his disillusion and frustrations with American society, Emerson laments in his diary thus:
Alas for America, as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent- one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear
2 Eric C. Otto. “Misdirected American Democracy: Emerson’s Solution in “The American Scholar”.” http://itech.fgcu.edu/&/issues/vol1/issue2/emerson.htm
up a mast to the clouds. It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with d ispersion and sloth. Eager, solicitous, rabid, busy-bodied America attempting many things, vain, ambitious to feel thy own existence and convince others of thy talent… catch thy breath and correct thyself, and failing here, prosper out there; speed and fever are never greatness; but reliance and serenity and waiting. America is formless, has no terrible and no beautiful condensation” (Edgar Lee Masters, pg. 23).
The evolution of a ‘free enterprise system’ or a capitalist economy, has been identified as evidence or elements that lend support to the creation of a highly ‘individualistic’ economic setup, that based on its theoretical assumptions, ensured a form of equal opportunity to individuals for the creation of wealth.
Religion, its nature and character, was also an issue of immense public concern. Puritanism, which reared its head in the New England territories, was believed to have had significant telling effects on religious conduct in American churches and especially on the ideals of society’s moral constitution. Some perspectives on the nature and character of Transcendentalism in America, intimate that Transcendentalism may in some way be indebted to Puritanism. The logic being that, both theorised a rejection of some form of convention. Puritanism, itself a form of dogmatism with its strict moral codes, emerged as a rejection of some form of administrative and biblical abuses within the Church.
IV. Statement of Problem
Some of the available literature and critical essays that deal with the associations between Emerson and Whitman, seem to represent Emerson and Whitman as though
they were the same people; that there is a palpable, conspicuous symmetry of thought between the two individuals, such that it was impossible to tell them apart. Most proponents of this argument, seem to conflate or confuse their transcendentalist sway with the possible influence one could have had on the other.
V. Objectives of the Study
The study intends to critically examine Whitman’s poetry with the ultimate objective of showing ‘how’ and to what extent ‘Emerson’ is echoed in the text. To achieve this ultimate objective, the study also hopes to achieve the following:
- Compare and contrast Whitman’s themes and ideological concerns with Emerson’s.
- Assess to what extent Whitman ‘deviates’ (moves away or rejects) or accepts the beliefs of Emerson’s precursor texts.
- Establish the relevance of the literary works of both writers and how this aided the intellectual and literary movement of 19th century American society.
- Evaluate how the ‘free-form’ of Whitman’s poetry reinforces the ideas he expresses.
VI. Significance of the Study
The researcher hopes that the study would be useful in a number of ways:
- That it would help reveal or facilitate an understanding of how the predecessors’ influence on the text, in this particular situation, indicates strength and not weakness.
- That through the exploration of Whitman’s and Emerson’s texts, the study would enable an appreciation of the deep social commitments these two writers owed to 19th century American society.
- Whitman freed poetry from the bondage of verse. Whitman made poetry prose. Regarded as the Father of modern poetry, Whitman’s technical innovations or ‘meddling’ with style was a major influence for African writers and modern poets. Thus, his influence on modern writing is important.
