Ralph Waldo Emerson in Context

My copy of Emerson's essays belonged to my grandmother and is dated 1898. It seems that she bought it herself as it is not dedicated by anyone else. It is a weighty tome of some 630 pages in two columns and includes a good many poems as well as the series of essays, Representative Men, English Traits and The Conduct of Life. This new volume does exactly what it says in the title, namely place Emerson in various contexts in four parts devoted to the sense of place, ideas, society and legacy. There are 32 individual contributions ranging through these areas, each with extensive notes and bibliography. There is also a very good chronology at the beginning.

Emerson lived from 1803 to 1882. He was one of the early subjects for photographs, some of which are reproduced as character studies and express different moods. He gradually becomes more craggy, but the benign smile remains. Like his contemporaries, he experienced many premature deaths, including that of his father and three siblings from TB, his first wife and his young son Waldo, a blow from which he reportedly never recovered. He also suffered a physical and mental collapse after his house burned in 1872 and even thrust into the flames the letters of his first wife and mementos of his beloved son. I mention this because the usual focus is on his work rather than his life.

During the course of his career, Emerson gave 1500 public lectures and took advantage of the advances in travel to visit Europe and far-flung areas of the United States. He regarded the purpose of travel as self-culture (cultivation) or what Goethe called Bildung, which included meeting Coleridge and Wordsworth as well as Carlyle on his first trip to England at the age of 30. He writes that wherever we go, self is the sole subject we study and learn and it can help us make a transition to what he calls intuitive Reason. He read and translated Latin, Greek and Italian, and was deeply influenced by German idealism. He read and re-read Plato throughout his life. However, he was also one of the first people to appreciate the spiritual riches of Asia and the poetry of Sufism. In connection with mountains, he writes that the good of going to the mountains is that life is reconsidered - it is the excursionary equivalent of acquiring a new idea.

Emerson lived through an age of revolutions. Historically, there was the influence of the American and French revolutions, then the uprisings in Europe of 1848, which he himself witnessed in Paris. He only became fully engaged in revolutionary causes in his outspoken championing of the abolition of slavery. He also supported a more prominent role for women, but stopping short of suggesting suffrage. His poetry is explicitly linked to justice as well as beauty, two elements that he regarded as intertwined, partly through the influence of Schiller.

The lecture hall and the club both offered opportunities for the exchange of ideas and relate back to the idea of cultivation mentioned above. Progress in this regard came from being open to change, growth and self-improvement, consistent with the American ethos of the time. There were many literary clubs in Boston at the time, which became centres of cultural and intellectual activity. The pre-eminent club was the Saturday Club, which included along with Emerson Longfellow, Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Clubs also performed (and still do) the important function of sociability and conviviality.

If Emerson's ethics are set out in his essay on Self-Reliance, then his mystical and spiritual views can be found in the magnificent essay on the Over-Soul, which also shows why he could not be contained within the orthodox religion of his time. This essay is well worth reading in the original. He describes it as 'this deep power in which we exist, and who is the beatitude is all accessible to us.' He goes on to say that 'when it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love' - surely a sublime sentiment.

Each chapter turns out to be a window into the contemporary world, whether of place (37,000 immigrants - mainly Irish - arrived in Boston in 1847 alone), science, history, friendship or even money. Emerson made $70,000 from the 300,000 books sold during his career, and was comfortably a millionaire by modern standards. For me, the value of engaging with Emerson is meeting a great and expensive mind through the writings he left behind, and this book provides an excellent overview of the different contexts in which he lived.