Subtitles section Play video
-
Ralph Waldo Emerson is the father of American literature.
-
In a series of strikingly original essays, written in the mid-nineteenth century,
-
he fundamentally changed the way that America saw its cultural and artistic
-
possibilities, and he enabled a separation from transatlantic literary traditions.
-
"We have listened too long...", he wrote, "...to the Courtly muses of Europe."
-
Emerson's abjection of cultural traditions brought about what one
-
contemporary called: "America's intellectual declaration of independence."
-
and he established generational conflict and transformation as commanding ideas
-
in American literature.
-
Emerson himself hardly seemed destined to fit a revolutionary mold.
-
He was born in 1803, the son of a Boston preacher, and was descended from a line
-
of New England ministers that went back to the bedrock of seventeenth-century
-
Puritanism. When his father died in 1811, his mother took in boarders to pay the
-
rent.
-
Still, she sent her son to Harvard in 1817, and then Harvard divinity school to
-
train for the priesthood in 1825.
-
As a young man,
-
Emerson was strongly influenced by a remarkable aunt of his: Mary Moody Emerson,
-
who though self-taught, had read everything from Shakespeare to the
-
romantics and it formed a unique religious perspective based on piety
-
nature and literature, that would resonate powerfully in the life and work
-
of her nephew.
-
So when Emerson was ordained in 1829, marrying the love of his life
-
Ellen Tucker in the same year, he was already unsatisfied with the formal
-
nature of New England religious orthodoxy.
-
When Ellen died of tuberculosis just two years later, he resigned from the church
-
and soon after embarked on a trip to Europe.
-
Leaving on Christmas Day 1832, two crucial things happened to Emerson
-
on that tour of europe.
-
In Paris, he went to the famous "Jardin des Plantes",
-
a botanical and zoological garden.
-
There he had an epiphany.
-
Writing in his journal that: "I feel the centipede in me,
-
the Cayman, carp, eagle and Fox...
-
...I am moved by strange sympathies. I say continually: I will be a naturalist.".
-
Emerson's insight was that nature is in us, a part of us,
-
and not just its higher forms,
-
but in all its grotesquerie and wildness.
-
The second thing that happened on that tour, was that Emerson met the English
-
romantic poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth,
-
and found them rather ordinary, dry and conservative men.
-
The insight that Emerson drew from this,
-
was that if great men could be so ordinary,
-
why should not ordinary men be great?
-
as he would write a few years later,
-
meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty, to accept the views which
-
Cicero, Locke, Bacon have given. Forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only
-
young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
-
Emerson had found two ideas that would guide his life's work.
-
That man and nature are one
-
and that everyone can recognize that they are
-
a uniquely, significant human being.
-
On his return to America in 1833, Emerson became a professional lecturer
-
giving talks on natural history and literature
-
in halls around New England.
-
He remarried and had several children,
-
presenting a stolid, bourgeois appearance to the world.
-
But his inner life was full of turbulence and originality.
-
In his 1836 essay, "Nature",
-
Emerson outlined the germ of a new philosophy, a key element of this, was the
-
importance of American originality. In its opening lines, Emerson wrote:
-
"Our age is retrospective, it builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies,
-
histories and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;
-
we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?".
-
America, needed to stop looking back to its European heritage
-
and start looking about it self.
-
No past moment was more important, than the present moment.
-
No tradition was more important, than novelty.
-
No generation, was better than the current generation.
-
Everything that matters is here now insisted Emerson,
-
and that here was: America.
-
This was an extension of Emerson's ideas, about the significance of the individual
-
that came under the heading of what he called "self-reliance".
-
Everywhere Emerson looked, he saw people leading lives that were based on tradition,
-
that were limited by religious forms and social habits.
-
No one could be themselves, Emerson thought, because they were all too busy
-
being what they were supposed to be.
-
Emerson wanted to get rid of each of these burdens:
-
the past, religion and social forms,
-
so that each person could find out who they truly were.
-
As he put it:
-
"History is an impertinence and an injury;
-
Our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us...
-
And...
-
...Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."
-
We must, he argued, live from within trusting nothing but our own intuitions.
-
For, as he concluded...
-
...nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
-
This leaves open a vital question: What is your nature...
-
...once you've rid yourself of history, tradition and religion?
-
What can be said is that it isn't necessarily self-indulgence, haterism
-
or narcissism.
-
Rather, it's the surrender to that force which Emerson recognized back in the
-
Jardin des Plantes.
-
An obedience to nature itself.
-
By nature, Emerson seem to mean the natural world: plants, animals, rocks and sky,
-
but what he really meant was God.
-
Emerson was a "Pantheist". That is, someone who believe that God exists in every
-
part of creation, from the smallest grain of sand to the stars.
-
But also crucially that the divine spark is in each of us.
-
In following ourselves,
-
we are therefore not merely being fickle or selfish,
-
we are rather, releasing a divine will,
-
that history, society and organized religion normally hide from us.
-
The individual as Emerson writes "is a God in ruins".
-
But we have it within us, by casting off all custom to rebuild ourselves
-
Emerson makes this Pantheist connection, explicit in what are perhaps his most
-
famous lines.
-
"Crossing a bear common, in snow puddles at twilight under a clouded sky,
-
without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune,
-
I've enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear,
-
standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blythe air and uplifted
-
into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes...
-
...I become a transparent eyeball...
-
...I am nothing...
-
...I see all. The currents of the universal being circulate through me...
-
...I am part or particle of God!
-
In the Romantic tradition on which Emerson draws, it is the sublime,
-
great mountains, rushing torrance, dark forests,
-
which releases the inner vision as we find ourselves in all of them.
-
For Emerson,
-
it's a perfectly dull walk across an ordinary common on a dark winter's evening
-
that brings him, to the brink of fear.
-
Emerson's God, is in the snow puddles too.
-
Stood there on the common,
-
he disappears, becoming nothing as the currents of God flow through him.
-
What is left is just, a transparent eyeball.
-
Such transcendent moments are rare,
-
but they reveal an essential connection between nature, God and man.
-
They are one.
-
They also give Emerson a proper sense of each individual's importance,
-
as a part of God.
-
Transcendentalism became the name of the movement that grew up around Emerson,
-
at this time.
-
Another aspect of the epiphany that was to have a profound
-
effect on American literature, was the emphasis on the value of the ordinary.
-
What Emerson put forward in essays like "The American scholar" and "the poet",
-
was that the American every day, was a proper subject for literature.
-
This was because for Emerson, the transcendentalist God is everywhere,
-
and it's the poet's job to reveal this.
-
"There is no object...", he wrote, "...so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful."
-
"...Even a corpse has its own beauty." This coming from a man who had opened his
-
first wife's tomb a year after her death...
-
...to take a look!
-
The great American writers, who followed Emerson,
-
were liberated by his work to look around and write about what they
-
saw and how they lived,
-
transforming the everyday into a vital symbol of something higher and more elusive.
-
Henry David Thoreau's two years at Walden Pond, became a book that showed
-
the cosmos reflected in the depths of the waters of a mere pond.
-
The poet Walt Whitman said: "I was simmering, simmering, simmering...
-
...Emerson brought me to a boil."
-
Emily Dickinson heard a fly and could write of the other side of death.
-
The novelist Herman Melville, took a whaling voyage,
-
and made it an allegory of American imperialism and the defiance of nature.
-
In the 20th century, the American critic Harold Bloom looked back
-
at Emerson's originality and saw in it the origin of:
-
"The strong tradition of American poets."
-
From Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens to John Ashbery,
-
Emerson's legacy to american literature and culture and indeed to the world,
-
was one of ceaseless invention and forward momentum.
-
As he put it: "I unsettle all things...
-
...no facts are to me sacred, none are profane...
-
...I simply experiment an endless seeker with no past at my back."
-
people of
-
Paul pronouncing his name if you don't speak German it's not at all obvious how
-
you're supposed to say it a safe bet is to start with a hard was a great check
-
writer who has come to own a part of the human emotional spectrum which we can
-
now call the casket desk and which thanks to him
-
where