Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

After last year’s tidal wave of scholarship on Emerson and Transcendentalism, 2011 was comparatively quiet, for Thoreau and Fuller studies as well. As on the coast, though, drawbacks portend another big one on the horizon. Nor is this to say that no major work appeared this year. For the second year in a row we have a new volume from the Emerson Edition. The now familiar revisionist picture of a politically, socially engaged Emerson has been further substantiated and enriched in different ways by Robert D. Habich’s Building Their Own Waldos and A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk; Thoreau’s trouble with his “inner animal” has been brilliantly illuminated by Neill Matheson; and, thanks to Clemens Spahr, we now have a full-scale analysis of Transcendentalism’s aesthetic critique of modernity.

i Ralph Waldo Emerson

a. Scholarly Editions

The biggest news this year was the appearance of a superb variorum edition of Emerson’s poems, volume 9 in The Collected Works (Harvard). One rarely encounters the term definitive text anymore, whether because of textual skepticism (no text is complete and definitiveness can always be redefined), indifference, or just plain ignorance of the difference between a scholarly edition and any other text that has rolled off the press. But spend 15 minutes with Poems: A Variorum Edition. Then try to imagine how anything between two covers could supersede much less substantively redefine it. Albert J. von Frank and Thomas Wortham established the text; von Frank wrote the comprehensive historical introduction, the textual introduction, and succinct, informative headnotes for every poem. The historical introduction traces the phases of Emerson’s poetic career, exploring the mysterious relationship between Ellen Tucker Emerson’s death, her husband’s grief, and his poetic birth; Emerson’s poetic theory and compositional practice; his midcareer discovery of Hāfez and other Persian poets; and the publication circumstances and reception of Emerson’s three poetry collections, Poems (1847), May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), and Selected Poems (1876). A fourth section of uncollected poems includes all the poetic mottoes Emerson began attaching to his essays beginning with Essays: Second Series as well as sundry poems and translations that were unpublished or that appeared in gift-books, The Dial, or elsewhere. Each poem is followed by a chronological list of all variant readings that have appeared in authorized texts, whether manuscript or printed, as well as valuable references to journal and notebook antecedents. Historical variations in poem formats (alternating indentation, vertical spacing, line and stanza breaks, etc.) are also noted. Above all, perhaps, even casual users of this handsome volume will prize the sharp critical insight and learning that inform the annotations and poem headnotes.

b. Emerson’s First Biographers

A major contribution to our understanding of the process of Emerson’s canonization, Building Their Own Waldos: Emerson’s First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age (Iowa) by Robert D. Habich is a well-crafted, multifaceted, and imminently readable study of the first six full-length biographies, all published in the 1880s. Building on recent studies of Emerson’s iconization that have emphasized the formative influence of culture and ideology, Habich expands the conception of ideology to account for not only the circulation of cultural scripts but also personal differences among the biographers’ relations to Emerson together with a host of circumstances that shaped the portraits they produced. These include vocational and family dynamics, the economics of publishing, audience relations and the contested status of a genre forced increasingly to compete with other media, and equally important, the authors’ motives as biographers, the choices they made as literary and cultural agents. A key point that emerges from this fine-grained biographical study of biographers, constructed from a wealth of archival material and documentary evidence, is the sheer variety of Emerson portraits produced in the decade, a variety that reflects both the many-sided subject and the interpretive positions of his biographers: Unitarian disciple (George Willis Cooke), progressive Manchester publisher (Alexander Ireland), Virginian anti-slavery advocate (Moncure D. Conway), Fireside Poet and...