Daddy by Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do   

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot   

For thirty years, poor and white,   

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

 

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   

Ghastly statue with one gray toe   

Big as a Frisco seal

 

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   

Where it pours bean green over blue   

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

 

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.   

My Polack friend

 

Says there are a dozen or two.   

So I never could tell where you   

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

 

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.   

And the language obscene

 

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

 

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

 

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

 

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.   

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

 

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,   

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot   

But no less a devil for that, no not   

Any less the black man who

 

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.   

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

 

But they pulled me out of the sack,   

And they stuck me together with glue.   

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

 

And a love of the rack and the screw.   

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,   

The voices just can’t worm through.

 

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you   

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

 

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

 

Daddy Summary

The speaker creates a figurative image of her father, using many different metaphors to describe her relationship with him. He's like a black shoe that she's had to live in; like a statue that stretches across the United States; like God; like a Nazi; like a Swastika; and, finally, like a vampire. The speaker, faced with her father as a giant and evil Nazi, takes the part of a Jew and a victim.

Yet, with this poem, the speaker gets her revenge, claiming that she's killed both her father and the man she made as a model of her father – her husband. This poem shows her struggle to declare that, no matter how terrible her father was and how much he remains in her mind, she is now through with him.

"Daddy" 

Summary

"Daddy," comprised of sixteen five-line stanzas, is a brutal and venomous poem commonly understood to be about Plath's deceased father, Otto Plath.

The speaker begins by saying that he "does not do anymore," and that she feels like she has been a foot living in a black shoe for thirty years, too timid to either breathe or sneeze. She insists that she needed to kill him (she refers to him as "Daddy"), but that he died before she had time. She describes him as heavy, like a "bag full of God," resembling a statue with one big gray toe and its head submerged in the Atlantic Ocean. She remembers how she at one time prayed for his return from death, and gives a German utterance of grief (which translates literally to "Oh, you").

She knows he comes from a Polish town that was overrun by "wars, wars, wars," but one of her Polack friends has told her that there are several towns of that name. Therefore, she cannot uncover his hometown, where he put his "foot" and "root."

She also discusses how she could never find a way to talk to him. Even before she could speak, she thought every German was him, and found the German language "obscene." In fact, she felt so distinct from him that she believed herself a Jew being removed to a concentration camp. She started to talk like a Jew and to feel like a Jew in several different ways. She wonders in fact, whether she might actually be a Jew, because of her similarity to a gypsy. To further emphasize her fear and distance, she describes him as the Luftwaffe, with a neat mustache and a bright blue Aryan eye. She calls him a "Panzer-man," and says he is less like God then like the black swastika through which nothing can pass. In her mind, "Every woman adores a Fascist," and the "boot in the face" that comes with such a man.

When she remembers Daddy, she thinks of him standing at the blackboard, with a cleft chin instead of a cleft foot. However, this transposition does not make him a devil. Instead, he is like the black man who "Bit [her] pretty red heart in two." He died when she was ten, and she tried to join him in death when she was twenty. When that attempt failed, she was glued back together. At this point, she realized her course - she made a model of Daddy and gave him both a "Meinkampf look" and "a love of the rack and the screw." She promises him that she is "finally through;" the telephone has been taken off the hook, and the voices can no longer get through to her.

She considers that if she has killed one man, then she has in fact killed two. Comparing him to a vampire, she remembers how he drank her blood for a year, but then realizes the duration was closer to seven years. She tells him he can lie back now. There is a stake in his heart, and the villagers who despised him now celebrate his death by dancing on his corpse. She concludes by announcing, "Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through."

Analysis

"Daddy" is perhaps Sylvia Plath's best-known poem. It has elicited a variety of distinct reactions, from feminist praise of its unadulterated rage towards male dominance, to wariness at its usage of Holocaust imagery. It has been reviewed and criticized by hundreds and hundreds of scholars, and is upheld as one of the best examples of confessional poetry.

It is certainly a difficult poem for some: its violent imagery, invocation of Jewish suffering, and vitriolic tone can make it a decidedly uncomfortable reading experience. Overall, the poem relates Plath's journey of coming to terms with her father's looming figure; he died when she was eight. She casts herself as a victim and him as several figures, including a Nazi, vampire, devil, and finally, as a resurrected figure her husband, whom she has also had to kill.

Though the final lines have a triumphant tone, it is unclear whether she means she has gotten "through" to him in terms of communication, or whether she is "through" thinking about him. Plath explained the poem briefly in a BBC interview:

The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. The father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other –she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.

In other words, contradiction is at the heart of the poem's meaning. Neither its triumph nor its horror is to be taken as the sum total of her intention. Instead, each element is contradicted by its opposite, which explains how it shoulders so many distinct interpretations.

This sense of contradiction is also apparent in the poem's rhyme scheme and organization. It uses a sort of nursery rhyme, singsong way of speaking. There are hard sounds, short lines, and repeated rhymes (as in "Jew," "through," "do," and "you"). This establishes and reinforces her status as a childish figure in relation to her authoritative father. This relationship is also clear in the name she uses for him - "Daddy"- and in her use of "oo" sounds and a childish cadence. However, this childish rhythm also has an ironic, sinister feel, since the chant-like, primitive quality can feel almost like a curse. One critic wrote that the poem's "simplistic, insistent rhythm is one form of control, the obsessive rhyming and repeated short phrases are others, means by which she attempts to charm and hold off evil spirits." In other words, the childish aspects have a crucial, protective quality, rather than an innocent one.

"Daddy" can also be viewed as a poem about the individual trapped between herself and society. Plath weaves together patriarchal figures – a father, Nazis, a vampire, a husband – and then holds them all accountable for history's horrors. Like "The Colossus," "Daddy" imagines a larger-than-life patriarchal figure, but here the figure has a distinctly social, political aspect. Even the vampire is discussed in terms of its tyrannical sway over a village. In this interpretation, the speaker comes to understand that she must kill the father figure in order to break free of the limitations that it places upon her. In particular, these limitations can be understood as patriarchal forces that enforce a strict gender structure. It has the feel of an exorcism, an act of purification. And yet the journey is not easy. She realizes what she has to do, but it requires a sort of hysteria. In order to succeed, she must have complete control, since she fears she will be destroyed unless she totally annihilates her antagonist.

The question about the poem's confessional, autobiographical content is also worth exploring. The poem does not exactly conform to Plath's biography, and her above-cited explanation suggests it is a carefully-constructed fiction. And yet its ambivalence towards male figures does correspond to the time of its composition - she wrote it soon after learning that her husband Ted Hughes had left her for another woman. Further, the mention of a suicide attempt links the poem to her life.

However, some critics have suggested that the poem is actually an allegorical representation of her fears of creative paralysis, and her attempt to slough off the "male muse." Stephen Gould Axelrod writes that "at a basic level, 'Daddy' concerns its own violent, transgressive birth as a text, its origin in a culture that regards it as illegitimate –a judgment the speaker hurls back on the patriarch himself when she labels him a bastard." The father is perceived as an object and as a mythical figure (many of them, in fact), and never really attains any real human dimensions. It is less a person than a stifling force that puts its boot in her face to silence her. From this perspective, the poem is inspired less by Hughes or Otto than by agony over creative limitations in a male literary world. However, even this interpretation begs something of an autobiographical interpretation, since both Hughes and her father were representations of that world.

Plath's usage of Holocaust imagery has inspired a plethora of critical attention. She was not Jewish but was in fact German, yet was obsessed with Jewish history and culture. Several of her poems utilize Holocaust themes and imagery, but this one features the most striking and disturbing ones. She imagines herself being taken on a train to "Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen," and starting to talk like a Jew and feel like a Jew. She refers to her father as a "panzer-man," and notes his Aryan looks and his "Luftwaffe" brutality. One of the leading articles on this topic, written by Al Strangeways, concludes that Plath was using her poetry to understand the connection between history and myth, and to stress the voyeurism that is an implicit part of remembering. Plath had studied the Holocaust in an academic context, and felt a connection to it; she also felt like a victim, and wanted to combine the personal and public in her work to cut through the stagnant double-talk of Cold War America. She certainly uses Holocaust imagery, but does so alongside other violent myths and history, including those of Electra, vampirism, and voodoo. Strangeways writes that, "the Holocaust assumed a mythic dimension because of its extremity and the difficulty of understanding it in human terms, due to the mechanical efficiency with which it was carried out, and the inconceivably large number of victims." In other words, its shocking content is not an accident, but is rather an attempt to consider how the 20th century's great atrocity reflects and escalates a certain human quality.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine that any of Sylvia Plath's poems could leave the reader unmoved. "Daddy" is evidence of her profound talent, part of which rested in her unabashed confrontation with her personal history and the traumas of the age in which she lived. That she could write a poem that encompasses both the personal and historical is clear in "Daddy."

Sylvia Plath

 Sylvia Plaths a Poet

Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963) was a distinguished American poet. She  was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. Her poetry tackles diverse literary topics. She is described as “one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English.”

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death in 1963. The Collected Poems were published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously. Consequently, her contribution to the American poetry is enormous. She was one of the first poets who introduced realism technique within the context of the American poetry 

The "confessional" poets composed poems in free verse with intensely volent imagery on subjects taken from their inner emotional lives. They shared interest in, and personal encounters with, psychotherapy. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme. 

Plath utilizes literary symbolic devices within expressionism in realistic techniques because she had been influenced by contemporary realistic poets. Being so, Plath wrote in the form of expressionism had not any concern with the state of individuals. They depended on expressionism to condemn complicated contemporary issues regarding industrialism and capitalism as products of systems not individuals. Being a realistic poet, similarly, Plath uses symbolic realistic verse and conversations in some of her poems. he faced difficult conflicts in her life and her inner self, and her suffering leads her to write poetry on the conflicts of all men in her milieu. As an autobiographical poet, Plath‘s main aim was to depict these conflicts in his poems. So that she tried to ease her inner pressures and storms, to justify herself to herself, not to the world through her writings, and from her experiences, she also tried to depict the conflicts of her age Intensely autobiographical, Plath’s poems explore her own mental anguish, her troubled marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, her unresolved conflicts with her parents, and her own vision of herself. 

Some of her most vivid poems, including the well-known “Daddy,” concern her troubled relationship with her authoritarian father and her feelings of betrayal when he died. Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius. Some critics lauded her as a confessional poet Plath used history “to explain herself,” writing about the Nazi concentration camps as though she had been imprisoned there.

On October 27, 1932, Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology, with a focus on apiology, the study of bees.

In 1940, when Sylvia was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strict father, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined her relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegaic and infamous poem, "Daddy."

Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school.

In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. She was an exceptional student, and despite a deep depression she went through in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt, she managed to graduate summa cum laude in 1955.

After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet, Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.

Plath returned to Massachusetts in 1957, and began studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. She returned to England where she gave birth to the couple's two children, Frieda and Nicholas Hughes, in 1960 and 1962, respectively.

In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. That winter, in a deep depression, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel.

In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide using her gas oven.

Plath’s poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, and compared to poets such as her teacher, Robert Lowell, and fellow student Anne Sexton. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.

Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize after death.

Emerson's Prose Style

 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. 

 The dew and fragrance of the morning are in all his works. Because he has read widely he gives an air of culture to the most homely matters by associating them with the great characters and the great books of the world. He has a large vocabulary at perfect command, but his instinct leads him to the simplest and most picturesque words. He chooses his expressions from the most unexpected places, here from the nursery, there from the Apocalypse or from the mystic books of the East; and not even Lowell approaches him in the ability to clothe his thought in a new dress, making its appeal as fresh and original as if it had been spoken in Eden at the spring time of the world.

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.”   

 

 Emerson as an Essayist.  

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".

 It was in 1841 that Emerson published Essays, his second book, which included the famous essay, "Self-Reliance". His aunt called it a "strange medley of atheism and false independence", but it gained favorable reviews in London and Paris. This book, and its popular reception, more than any of Emerson's contributions to date laid the groundwork for his international fame.^]

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.

Emerson uses Transcendentalist and Romantic views to get his points across by explaining a true American scholar's relationship to nature. There are a few key points he makes that flesh out this vision:

·         We are all fragments, "as the hand is divided into fingers", of a greater creature, which is mankind itself, "a doctrine ever new and sublime."

·         An individual may live in either of two states. In one, the busy, "divided" or "degenerate" state, he does not "possess himself" but identifies with his occupation or a monotonous action; in the other, "right" state, he is elevated to "Man", at one with all mankind.

·         To achieve this higher state of mind, the modern American scholar must reject old ideas and think for him or herself, to become "Man Thinking" rather than "a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking", "the victim of society", "the sluggard intellect of this continent".

·         "The American Scholar" has an obligation, as "Man Thinking", within this "One Man" concept, to see the world clearly, not severely influenced by traditional/historical views, and to broaden his understanding of the world from fresh eyes, to "defer never to the popular cry."

·         The scholar's education consists of three influences:

·         I. Nature as the most important influence on the mind

·         II. The Past manifest in books

·         III. Action and its relation to experience

·         The last, unnumbered part of the text is devoted to Emerson's view on the "Duties" of the American Scholar who has become the "Man Thinking."