英美文学选读学习笔记 Ralph Waldo Emerson

Speaking of American Romanticism, we can never ignore New England Transcendentalism, which is unanimously agreed to be the summit of the Romantic period in the history of American literature. And the chief spokesman of this spiritual movement is Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

Emerson was a descendent of a long line of New England clergymen, son of a Unitarian minister. Though born of an impoverished family, Emerson never failed to receive some formal education. He was sent at nine to the Boston Public Latin School and at fourteen went to Harvard. His years at Harvard spaninity School were frugal, industrious, and undistinguished. While a student at Harvard he began keeping journals -- records of his thoughts, a practice he continued throughout his life. He later drew on the journals for materials for his essays and poetry. After Harvard, he taught as a schoolmaster, which he soon gave up for the study of theology. He began aching in 1826 and three years later he became a pastor in a church in Boston. Emerson was ardent at first in his service in religion, but gradually grew skeptical of the beliefs of the church; feeling Unitarianism intolerable, he finally left the ministry in 1832.

Soon after he resigned, Emerson embarked on a leisurely European tour, during the time of which he was greatly influenced by European Romanticism. He met some literary men of the time, such as Carlyle, and listened to some famous Romantic poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth. Through his acquaintance with these men he became closely involved with German idealism and Transcendentalism. After he was back from Europe, Emerson retreated to a quiet study at Concord, Massachusetts, where he began to pursue his new path of "self-eliance." Emerson formed a club there at Concord with people like Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, which was later known as the Transcendental Club. And the unofficial manifesto for the Club wasNature (1836), Emerson's first little book, which established him ever since as the most eloquent spokesman of New England Transcendentalism. He also helped to found and edit for a time the Transcendental journal, The Dial. Emerson lived an intellectually active and significant life between the mid-1830s and the mid-1840s, lecturing all over the country, and occasionally, abroad. He ached his Transcendental pursuit and his reputation expanded dramatically with his lectures and his essays. Though the rest of Emerson's life was a slow anticlimax to his middle years, people continued to honor the most influential prophet and the intellectual liberator of their age, and his reputation as a family man of conventional life and a decent, solid citizen has remained always.

Emerson is generally known as an essayist. During all his life he worked steadily at a succession of essays, usually derived from his journals or lectures he had already given. Nature did not establish him as an important American writer. His lasting reputation began only with the publication of Essays (1841), which had been tried out in his lectures when he was traveling to ach his ideas in the United States, and Canada as well. Many of his famous essays are included in Essays, which convey the best of his philosophical discussions and transcendental pursuits, such as The American Scholar, Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul. The second collection of Emerson's essays, Essays: Second Series (1844) demonstrated even more thoroughly than the first that Emerson's intellect had sharpened in the years since Nature. The Poet and Experience are examples, the former a reflection upon the aesthetic problems in terms of the sent state of literature in America and the latter a discussion about the conflict between idealism and ordinary life.

Emersonian Transcendentalism is actually a philosophical school which absorbed some ideological concerns of American Puritanism and European Romanticism, with its focus on the intuitive knowledge of human beings to grasp the absolute in the universe and the spaninity of man. In his essays, Emerson put forward his philosophy of the over-soul, the importance of the Inspanidual, and Nature. Emerson rejected both the formal religion of the churches and the Deistic philosophy; instead he based his religion on an intuitive belief in an ultimate unity, which he called the "over-soul." Emerson and other Transcendentalists believed that there should be an emotional communication between an inspanidual soul and the universal "over-soul," since the over-soul is an alt-pervading power from which all things come from and of which all are a part. Emerson's remarkable image of "a transparent eyeball" marks a paradoxical state of being, in which one is merged into nature, the over-soul, while at the same time retaining a unique perception of the experience. Emerson is affirmative about man's intuitive knowledge, with which a man can trust himself to decide what is right and to act accordingly. The ideal inspanidual should be a self-reliant man. "Trust thyself," he wrote in Self-Reliance, by which he means to convince people that the possibilities for man to develop and improve himself are infinite. Emerson's nature is emblematic of the spiritual world, alive with God's overwhelming sence; hence, it exercises a healthy and restorative influence on human mind. "Go back to nature, sink yourself back into its influence and you'll become spiritually whole again." By employing nature as a big symbol of the Spirit, or Cod, or the over-soul, Emerson has brought the Puritan legacy of symbolism to its perfection.

Emerson is the most resentative of the philosophical and literary school which is American Transcendentalism and it inspired in his lifetime a whole generation of famous authors like Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson, among whom Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is most often mentioned. Emerson's junior by fourteen years, Thoreau embraced his master's ideas as a disciple. In 1845 he built a cabin on some land belonging to Emerson by Walden Pond and moved in to live there in a very simple manner for a little over two years, which gave birth to a great transcendentalist work Walden (1854). The book not only fully demonstrates Emersonian ideas of self-reliance but also develops and tests Thoreau's own transcendental philosophy. For Thoreau, nature is not merely symbolic, but spanine in itself and human beings can receive cise communication from the natural world by way of pure senses. So he was often alone in the woods or by the pond, lost in spiritual communion with nature. Thoreau strongly believed in self-culture and was eager to identify himself with the Transcendental image of the self-reliant man. To achieve personal spiritual perfection, he thinks, the most important thing for men to do with their lives is to be self-sufficient, so he sought to reduce his physical needs and material comforts to a minimum to get spiritual richness. His positiveness about the importance of inspanidual conscience was such that he even considered the society fetters of the freedom of inspaniduals. Though Thoreau became more than Emerson's disciple eventually, his indebtedness to Nature and its author has never been overlooked.

Emerson's essays often have a casual style, for most of them were derived from his journals or lectures. They are usually characterized by a series of short, declarative sentences, which are not quite logically connected but will flower out into illustrative statements of truth and thoughts. Emerson's philosophical discussion is sometimes difficult to understand but he uses comparisons and metaphors to make the general idea of his work clearly exssed. Well-read in the classics of Western European literature, Emerson often employed these literary sources to make and enrich his own points but never let them take the full reins of his discussion. In general, Emerson was showing to the world a distinctive American style, as he called for in The American Scholar in 1837.