EN 2206 The American Scholar

Emerson, “The American Scholar” (1837)

Text: Norton Anthology, 1101-1114

Specific Occasion: Speech delivered at the commencement of the academic year, addressed to University students at Harvard.

Tone and Manner: Exhortatory, didactic.

Larger Context:

An augury of hope for new beginnings in which the new generation of young scholars have a large role to play in reviving a love of literature in an age devoted to mechanical skills.

The Duties of the Scholar:

“The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.” (1108)

‘He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history.” (1109)

He must “defer never to the popular cry.” (1109)

He must learn to be free and brave: “The world is his who can see through its pretension.” (1110)

“The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future.” (1113)

Plan & Structure of the Argument:

To speak of “the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by action.” (1108)

Doctrinal belief: “the identity of all minds” (1105)

The student is advised to remember that “there is One Man …. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parceled out to individuals”, but, “the individual to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers.” (1102)

The Influence of Nature:

Nature: “the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.” (1102);

Teaches the young mind the importance of “discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere…” (1103)

The young scholar shall learn to see “that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for apart.” (1103)

The Influence of Books:

Books are “the mind of the Past.” (1103)

The “act of thought” (“Man Thinking”) is more sacred than books treated as “accepted dogmas.” (1104)

“Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.” (1104)

To rely on “no other information than by the printed page” “needs a strong head to bear that diet” (1105)

The student must find “the right way of reading:” “creative reading … when the mind is braced by labor and invention” (1105)

“Colleges … can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create” (1106)

“Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential” (1106)

The Value of Action:

“the final value of action … is that it is a resource” (1107)

“Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary.” (1108)

“living … is a total act. Thinking is a partial act.” (1108)

“Men … very naturally seek money or power …. Wake them” (1110-11)

“This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture.” (1111)

The Current Age:

Emerson dismisses the claim that the current age is “the age of Introversion” (1111)

“auspicious signs of the coming days”: “Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized.” (1112)

“The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time.”… It is a sign—is it not? of new vigor? …. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic … show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking … in these suburbs and extremities of nature” (1112)

Acknowledged Influences on Emerson:

British Romantics, Goethe, and Swedenborg: “he saw and showed the connexion between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible world.” (1113)

Language, Imagery, Metaphors:

Examples:

1103: the air pump analogy

1106: the mulberry leaf analogy

1107: the grub metaphor

1107: the oak metaphor

1107: the quarry metaphor

1108: the nettles and vines analogy

1111: the cistern metaphor

1111: the metaphor of a central fire

1112: the lumber room analogy