The American Renaissance/Romantic Period Assignment

This will be on RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882) but as in the outline have to discuss Washington Irving. And Edgar Allen Poe will be the person I use for the peom. I will Post here some informatin from the book. The book is The Bedford Anthology American Literature, Volume 1, Second Edition. I will also put in the chat as well. I want to put information for all so it can be information from the book added in my essay. No Outside sources if possible.

Ralph Waldo Emerson [18031882]

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803. For generations, the men in the Emerson family had served as cler-gymen, and his father was the pastor of the First Church of Boston. When he died in 1811, the family was nearly destitute, but Emersons mother was determined that her sons would be educated. At the age of fourteen, Emerson enrolled in Harvard College. An undistinguished student, he graduated in 1821 and taught at a school for young women until 1825. He then entered Harvard Divinity School and was ordained as a minister in 1829. Soon after that, he became the pastor of the prominent Second Church of Boston. With such a background, and with his gift for preach-ing, a distinguished clerical career seemed the likely path for Emerson. But his religious convictions were deeply influenced by works of German philosophy and theology, which were becoming available to American readers in translations and filtered through English writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Inspired by such Romantic idealism, Emerson increas-ingly came to value the moral instincts of the individual over the tenets of organized religion. His skepticism about orthodox Christianity grew, and in 1832 he resigned from his position at Second Church. Emerson then embarked on an extended tour of Europe, determined to

chart a new course for his life. While there, he met a number of well-known English writers, including Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and most importantly Thomas Carlyle, with whom he would enjoy a lifelong correspondence. When Emerson returned to the United States in 1834, he settled in Concord, Massachusetts. Unlike many of his contemporaries who had to balance the need to earn a living with their intellectual pur-suits, Emerson had an independent income. In 1829, the year of his ordi-nation, he had married Ellen Tucker, a young woman from an affluent family in New Hampshire. The shock of her death from tuberculosis six-teen months later probably contributed to Emersons decision to leave the ministry. The settlement of her estate also left him with a legacy of $1,200 per year at that time an income sufficient for a comfortable, though not a lavish, lifestyle. Although he apparently never got over the death of his first wife, in 1835 Emerson married Lydia Jackson, an accomplished and by all accounts a remarkable person with whom he shared religious con-victions, as well as a wide range of literary and philosophical interests. The couple settled into Coolidge House, a comfortable home Emerson purchased on the outskirts of Concord. By then, all of the elements were in place for the independent scholarly life Emerson had in mind for him-self. That life included reading and study, occasional preaching, and espe-cially writing daily entries in the journals and notebooks he would keep throughout his life; letters to an increasingly large number of correspon-dents in the United States and Europe; and his first book, Nature (1836). Although it was published anonymously, the author of that little book

was an open secret, and Emerson soon found himself at the center of a small circle of intellectuals who met regularly in Boston or Concord. Called the transcendentalists because of their embrace of intellectuals who met regularly in Boston or Concord. Called the transcendentalists because of their embrace of idealistic or transcendental philosophy, the group was initially composed of Unitar-ian ministers but ultimately came to include writers as diverse as Emer-sons friends Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. It was not, however, the publication of his first book that gained Emerson promi-nence. Two lectures, both delivered at Harvard, marked the beginning of his engagement with a larger audience: The American Scholar (1837), which Oliver Wendell Holmes called an intellectual Declaration of Inde-pendence; and his address to the Harvard Divinity School in 1838. That address, in which Emerson vigorously exposed what he viewed as the defects in orthodox Christianity and in the training of Unitarian minis-ters, generated a furious controversy in Boston. In fact, some of the con-servative Unitarian clergy were so outraged, that Emerson was not invited back to speak at Harvard for thirty years. But he continued to preach occasionally, and Emerson also began to exploit a new form of communicating with audiences, both in and far beyond the confines of Boston. A lecture is a new literature, he buoyantly observed in his jour-nal in 1839, which leaves aside all tradition, time, place, circumstance, & addresses an assembly as mere human beings, no more. The hundreds of lectures Emerson delivered during the following decades were the primary source of both his income and his books. Essays (1841) was derived from his lectures, as was Essays: Second Series (1844). During the period in which he wrote and published those celebrated vol-umes, Emerson also helped to establish and edit the Dial, the unofficial journal of the Transcendental Club. He also wrote a good deal of poetry, which he gathered together in his Poems, published in 1847. From 1845 to 1846, he delivered a lecture series he would later revise and publish as Representative Men (1850), a collection of biographical studies of individ-ual greatness as represented by figures ranging from Plato through Shakespeare to modern figures such as the influential German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the French military and political leader Napoleon Bonaparte. Outraged by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Emerson became increasingly involved in the antislavery crusade during that decade. But he continued to spend most of his time riding what he called the lyceum express, a reference to his tours to lyceums and lecture halls throughout the North. During those extended tours, he first delivered the lectures revised for English Traits (1856), based on his second trip to Europe in 184748, and Conduct of Life (1860). In the view of most scholars, those were the last of his major works, though Emerson published a collection of late essays, Society and Solitude, in 1870. By then, however, both his health and memory had begun to fail, and Emerson wrote little more before he died on April 27, 1882. Reading Emersons Nature. Emersons first book, which he published anonymously in 1836, was a slim volume of ninety-five pages divided into nine sections Introduction, Nature, Commodity, Beauty, Lan-guage, Discipline, Idealism, Spirit, and Prospects. Part philosophy, part sermon, and part poetry, the book was Emersons fullest statement concerning the relationship between man and the natural world, as well as the relationship between matter and spirit. Written during a period of rapid economic growth and the emergence of an increasingly strong mar-ket economy in the United States, the book reveals Emersons deep con-cern about the role of nature, both in individual lives and in American life. The book also reveals the impact of Emersons reading, especially of Aids to Reflection, by the British writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Influenced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Coleridge distinguished between the Understanding, a rational faculty of the mind dependent on sense experience, and Reason, an inward beholding or intuitive apprehen-sion of spiritual truth. Emerson adopted that crucial distinction in Nature. Emersons nature thus comprises a series of signs, which for those who develop the ability to read them ultimately lead to the recognition of a spiritual reality that transcends nature. With its emphasis on the power of human intuition and the inexhaustible significance of nature, Emersons little book became a central document for the group of writers and think-ers known as the transcendentalists. The complete text is taken from the first edition of Nature (1836). Reading Emersons Poetry. Like many of his friends and contemporaries, Emerson was deeply interested in poetry. He also affirmed the poets central role in American life and culture. In his essay The Poet (1844), for example, he declared that the poet is representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common-wealth. Emerson himself sought and encouraged other poets to experiment. Nonetheless, his poetry was fairly conventional in form, highly intellectual in content, and constrained in feeling. The texts of The Rhodora, The Snow-Storm, and Hamatreya are taken from his first volume of poetry, Poems (1847). The text of Days is taken from its first appearance in the inaugural issue of the Atlantic Monthly (November 1857). Emerson later included it in his second book of poetry, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867).

The rhodora:1 on beInG asked, Whence Is The floWer?

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook. The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay; Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, And court the flower that cheapens his array Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being: Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! I never thought to ask, I never knew; But, in my simple ignorance, suppose

10 15

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you. [1839, 18 The snoW-sTorm Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving oer the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the gardens end.

The sled and traveller stopped, the couriers feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north winds masonry.

Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work

So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he For number or proportion. Mockingly, On coop or kennel he hangs Parian1 wreaths; A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn; Fills up the farmers lane from wall to wall,

Maugre the farmers sighs; and, at the gate, A tapering turret overtops the work. And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art

To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, Built in an age, the mad winds night-work, The frolic architecture of the snow.