Emerson’s Prose-Style
Emerson is one of the
greatest American essayists of the nineteenth century. He is quite different
from the English like Addison, Lamb, Hazlitt, Arnold or Stevenson .
He was primarily a philosophical thinker. He was a Transcendentalist. He believed that God pervades the whole
universe.
The essays of the English are short. But Emerson’s essays are very long. His essays are as a vast treaty of nature in which multitudes of argument and illustrations jostle one another for existence. On the basis of their form, his essays may be called Lectures. Some of them may be called treatises or orations. The body of his essay is vast. It contains various topics under the main title. The essay -- The American Scholars covers about fifteen pages. It talks about the major influence on the scholar, it discusses the duties of a scholar, it is in a way American intellectual declaration of independence '.
Emerson essays are loosely constructed. His paragraphs are not based on any logical sequences. The points of his thought are not related to one another by virtue of logical discussion. In 'the American scholar ' he tells first his readers that Americans should now make a declaration of literary Independence. Then he tells them that the American scholar should be a 'Man - thinking‘. Thereafter he describes the influence upon the mind of man. He was a great scholar. His vision was vast. As soon as he is in a position to complete a paragraph a new vision comes up and ideas form themselves into a circle.
Emerson style for writing
essays is philosophical. He writes “There
is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of
this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself”. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose
beginning, whose ending, he never can find,—so entire, so boundless”. Further ,
" A Man should learn to detect and watch the gleam of light which flashes
across his mind from within’.
Emerson’s prose-style is noted for its aphoristic quality and its epigrammatic terseness. The essay is
with him, as with Bacon, a series of short, quotable assertions without the
logical unity of the discourse, but all bound together by the intellectual
atmosphere of the source from whence they proceed. Many of his sentences are
remarkable for their force, subtlety, and impressiveness, and some for their
poetical beauty. The imagery is of great range, from the sun and stars and down
to the meanest weed or insect, and the diction is quaint and original but not
in the least affected. “Man hopes. Genius
creates”.
He has used a number of stylistic devices such as figures of
speech, analogy, antithetically balanced sentences, epigrams, rhetorical etc.
The use of these various devices can easily be illustrated from any of his
essays –
The perception of analogy takes also the less direct and more forceful form of
metaphor. Literary fashions are seen as “the mere remains of foreign harvests.”
He expects confidently a time, “when the intellect of this continent will look
out from its iron lids.” The young scholar is, “a school boy under the bending
dome of day.” Books are lamps to guide our steps to the East again, where the
dawn is.
To the poet’s privilege of metaphor, Emerson adds the idealist’s
prerogative of paradox, which is at
once a way of seeing things as well as a way of saying them. It is a
philosopher’s game, played with appearance and reality. Diversity and even
contrariness are to him only a dramatic presentation of some great designs.
“The drop is a small ocean,” “The near explains the far,” “One design unites
and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench”, and, of course, the
most basic paradox of all is the one in which, “Everything that tends to
insulate the individual ……tends to true union as well as greatness.”
Emerson reminds us often of Milton,
especially in The American Scholar, by his eloquence, by the amplitude and
sweep of his sentences, the rhythm and
the poetry of his descriptions. He reminds us just as often of Bacon with his
confident aphorisms. The fullness of the longer sentences is balanced by the
sharpness of epigram and the greatness of antithesis. He has a whole series of antithetically balanced sentences,
where he describes how experience becomes truth and art in the crucible of the
scholar’s mind. Readily noticeable also is the skilful use of rhetorical
devices, like inversion, repetition or interrogation. “Emerson has the poet’s
ear for the music of words, and something even of the more obvious phonetic and
musical satisfaction of verse may be found in Emerson’s prose. Apart from the
usual balancing of sound with the sense, characteristic of the antithetical
construction, we notice also the devices of rhythm, the balancing of sound
through repetition and contrast in passages. With Emerson prose is the other
harmony, i.e. poetry. He is one of the greatest writers of poetic-prose. His sentences have the rhythm and cadence of poetry.
Such as
“It came into him life; it went out
from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him
immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was
dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now
endures, it now flies, it now inspires”.
According to a noted critic, it is idle
to analyse Emerson’s style, if we think of style as meaning order and
arrangement: for his method of writing—by stringing together selections from
his note-books—made it impossible that his works should have any continuity of
thought or unity of expression. But if we think of style simply as manner, as
the reflection of personality, and then consider Emerson’s most characteristic
paragraphs which suggest stars, flowers and glimmering crystals, then there is
no style to compare with his in our literature.
There can be no denying the fact that Emerson is one of the greatest of
prose-stylist in the English language, but he has also glaring faults and
short-comings. He lacked the gift of sustained construction. His style is best
illustrated in selected passages. The sentences are terse, vital, epigrammatic;
yet they are always poetic rather than practical, and always hint at much more
than they express. Because he lives much out of doors and is intimate with
earth, air and water, Emerson’s figures have an elemental quality unlike those of any other writer.
Emerson is always striving after
eloquence of expression, not to convince his hearers—such a personal motive
would never occur to him—but simply because it is in his blood, because
eloquence seems to him Man’s natural expression, his unconscious reflection of
his harmony with the universe.
A number of critics
are of the view that Emerson, the essayist, is not the artist. In the opinion
of Spiller, Emerson is - “a writer who is artistic but not an artist ".
Emerson is said to have got no sense of composition. He is accused of writing
loose sentences with no sense of syntax .When he starts elaborating his ideas
his sense of form disappears and continuation becomes illogical, incoherence is
the result of it all. Emerson’s prose has something beautiful style, something
dangling. A critic says about his essays that they are - " a chaos full of
shooting stars " To find his style , we may conclude him as a great
scholar and a great Thinker .
His essays are replete with
his wisdom. He was an intellectual, a deep Thinker and an eloquent speaker .
Perhaps the most fitting commentary on their relationship to Indian literature was made by Gandhi after reading Emerson’s essays: “The essays to my mind contain the teaching of Indian wisdom in a western ‘genre’. It is interesting to see our own sometimes differently fashioned.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an
American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led
the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen
as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the
countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through
dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the
United States.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs
of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of
Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech
entitled The American
Scholar in 1837, which Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual
Declaration of Independence".
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His
first two collections of essays – Essays: First
Seriesand Essays: Second
Series, published respectively in 1841
and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known
essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the
decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.
Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed
philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and
the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's
"nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic; "Philosophically considered, the universe is
composed of Nature and the Soul."
While his writing style has been considered impenetrable by some, Emerson's
essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking, and Emerson's work has
greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that have followed him. When
asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man." Emerson is also well
known as a mentor and friend of fellowTranscendentalist Henry David Thoreau.
Emerson anonymously published
his first essay, Nature, on September 9, 1836. A year later, on
August 31, 1837, Emerson delivered his now-famousPhi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar", then known as "An Oration, Delivered before
the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge"; it was renamed for a collection
of essays (which included the first general publication of "Nature")
in 1849. Friends urged him to publish the talk, and he did so, at his own
expense, in an edition of 500 copies, which sold out in a month.[1] In the speech, Emerson declared
literary independence in the United States and urged Americans to create a
writing style all their own and free from Europe.James Russell Lowell, who was a student at Harvard at the time, called it
"an event without former parallel on our literary Emerson's religious
views were often considered radical at the time. He believed that all things
are connected to God and, therefore, all things are divine. Critics believed
that Emerson was removing the central God figure; as Henry
Ware, Jr. said,
Emerson was in danger of taking away "the Father of the Universe" and
leaving "but a company of children in an orphan asylum".
Emerson was partly influenced by German philosophy and Biblical
criticism. ] His views, the basis of Transcendentalism, suggested that God does not have to
reveal the truth but that the truth could be intuitively experienced directly
from nature.annals". Another member of the audience, Reverend John
Pierce, called it "an apparently incoherent and unintelligible
address".
Emerson was introduced to Indian philosophy when
reading the works of French philosopher Victor Cousin.[92] In
1845, Emerson's journals show he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas
Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas. Emerson
was strongly influenced by the Vedas, and much of his writing has strong shades of nondualism. One of the clearest examples of this can be found in his
essay "The Over-soul":
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in
particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the
universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal
ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all
accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the
act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and
the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the
animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.[94]
As a lecturer and orator,
Emerson—nicknamed the Concord Sage—became the leading voice of intellectual
culture in the United States
Emerson's work not only influenced his contemporaries, such
as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence
thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the
present. Notable thinkers who recognize Emerson's influence include Nietzsche andWilliam
James, Emerson's godson.
Emerson presupposes that the mind is initially subject to
an unhappy conformism.
Self-Reliance is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s compilation of many years’ works and the archetype for his transcendental philosophies. Throughout the essay he gives a defense for his famous catch-phrase “trust thyself.” This argument follows three major points: the self-contained genius, the disapproval of the world, and the value of self-worth.
Throughout this essay, Emerson argues against conformity with the world. He gives an archetype for his own transcendental beliefs, but also argues for his slogan “trust thyself.” For someone to transcend their current state, one must lean only on their own understanding, hold a certain level of disregard for the opinions and currents of society, and most importantly hold a respect for self regardless of circumstances and societies opinions.
