First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

Notes

Nature 89 Where possible, I have referred the reader to the two Emerson volumes in the Library of America, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), hereafter referred to as Lib of Am 1983; and Ralph Waldo Emerson : Collected Poems and Translations, ed. Harold Bloom and Paul Kane (New York: Library of America, 1994), hereafter cited as Lib of Am 1994. Emerson’s journal entries are almost entirely from the grand Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1982), hereafter JMN. Introduction “Meek young men . . . wrote those books”: “The American Scholar,” Lib of Am 1983, p. 57. “were never troubled . . . we enter it”: JMN 2:219. “those books . . . their times”: JMN 2:265. “I should like . . . valuable work”: Ibid. “We too . . . Bibles”: “Goethe,” in Representative Men, Lib of Am 1983, p. 761. “in the long run . . . aim at”: Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 27. “All things . . . wrong one”: “The American Scholar,” Lib of Am 1983, p. 54. “must do . . . cloud of arrows”: JMN 10:41. Notes 90 Nature “Daughters of Time . . . saw the scorn”: “Days,” in “May-Day and Other Pieces,” Lib of Am 1994, p. 178. “The first rule . . . meant to say”: JMN 4:276. “Good writing . . . perpetual allegories”: JMN 5:63. “All writing . . . dead word”: JMN 16:167. “The thing . . . array of arguments”: JMN 5:42. “Contagion . . . or ‘gin’”: JMN 9:46. “All that can . . . be written”: JMN 8:438. “When I look . . . very contemptible”: JMN 7:415. Reading “There is . . . creative writing”: “The American Scholar,” Lib of Am 1983, p. 59. “First we . . . we write”: JMN 8:320. “the student . . . the commentary”: “History,” Lib of Am 1983, p. 239. “you are the book’s book”: “Subjectiveness,” part of Emerson’s “Philosophy of the People” series of 1866. Manuscript in Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMSAm 1280.209 (12). “if I had read . . . as ignorant”: JMN 2:230. “If I am . . . by poring”: Essays of Montaigne, vol. 2, tr. Charles Cotton (London, 1926 [1685]), pp. 86–87. the hourglass . . . the Golconda: See S. T. Coleridge, 1811–1812, Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, Lecture 2. “I expect . . . the assimilating power”: JMN 8:254. “It seemed to me . . . me as that”: Edward W. Emerson, Emerson in Concord (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), p. 29. “I push the little . . . in Paradise again”: The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 7, ed. Eleanor Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 393. “It is taking . . . displaces me”: JMN 8:254. “I surprised you . . . lie low”: JMN 8:71. “drugged . . . of wisdom”: Bliss Perry, The Heart of Emerson’s Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), p. 250. “If a man . . . soon be knowing”: JMN 4:372. “A vast number . . . by the dead”: “Literature. First Lecture,” in The Present Age series, Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3, ed. S. E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 210. “We are too civil . . . hundred pages”: JMN 7:457. “The public necessarily . . . above its model”: JMN 5:500. A later version appears in “The Divinity School Address.” 90 Notes to Pages 1–11 Nature 91 “It is always . . . read old books”: “Books,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson , Society and Solitude, centenary ed. (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1904). “If Homer . . . avail him nothing”: Early Lectures, vol. 2 (1964), p. 260. “A man must . . . to his state”: JMN 4:51. “nothing . . . of his own state”: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Modern Library, 1928 [1916]), p. 180. “What can we see . . . to be born”: “Ethics,” in Early Lectures, vol. 2, p. 149. “Insist that . . . perhaps Kant will”: JMN 5:390. Early Lectures, vol. 2, has a reworked version, pp. 260–261. “It makes no difference . . . American History”: JMN 10:34–35. “Every word . . . every word”: JMN 8:157. “Everything a man knows . . . of himself”: JMN 3:196. “Philosophers must not . . . not the receiver’s”: JMN: 5:462. “What is genius . . . a thousand different things”: JMN 6:113. “Reading is closely . . . limestone condition”: Charles J. Woodbury , Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1890), pp. 24–25. “who are not lazy . . . books of travel too”: Ibid., pp. 25–26. “And there is Darwin . . . see him here”: Ibid., p. 26. “Avoid all . . . your own quarrying”: Ibid., p...