Through the 1830s, American Romanticism can be marked by a number of stages. The first stage can be represented by William Cullen Bryant’s respond to the British Graveyard and Romantic poets, especially William Wordsworth. The second is represented by the proto-environmental aesthetics of the Hudson River School, especially Thomas Cole’s arguments about the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque elements of the American landscape.

The third, perhaps climactic stage was developed by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophical essays, beginning in the late 1830s. If the Hudson River School centered around the work of Thomas Cole, this new current within Romanticism would revolve around Emerson. Collectively, the group is known as the Transcendentalists. Emerson would provide a highly rigorous, conceptual framework that would push American Romanticism as far as it could go. This chapter provides an overview of some key currents in his thought. It focuses on some of his key influences, especially Swedenborg and the Bhagavad Gita.

The following video, by School of Life, offers a highly accessible introduction to Emerson.

Some key points:

• Emerson helped nudge American cultural towards its “intellectual declaration of independence.”
• Born to a Boston preacher and part of a lineage that reaches back to the 17th-century Puritans.
• Influenced by his aunt.
• Ordained in 1829, but unsatisfied with New England orthodoxy (then: Congregationalism).
• 1832 tour of Europe: In the Paris garden, he was “moved by strange sympathies.”
• Would become convinced that Nature is in us.
• Became disenchanted with the British Romantics and disappointed by the past more generally.
• Beginning in 1833, he became a popular lecturer.
• In 1836, he published Nature, which emphasized originality over traditionalism.
• Wanted Americans to focus on the present, not the past. America was the supremely “present-oriented” nation.
• Self-Reliance means discarding social pressures and relying more on personal intuitive.
• Self-reliance is about surrender to a force within you, not narcissism.
• Was close to something like a “pantheist” (although the video overplays this somewhat; he’s better viewed as a mystic).
• The sublime in nature releases us from our “mean egotism.” In these moments, we can become a “transparent eyeball.”
• Valued the “ordinary” and the “everyday.” God is everywhere and the poet should help reveal this.
• Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and many others were highly influenced by his vision.

Emerson and Emanuel Swedenborg

As the video above mentions, Emerson claims to have had an epiphany in the Paris gardens in which he was “moved by strange sympathies.” We can understand this as part of the movement to extend the sublime that Thomas Cole also experimented with in “Essays on American Scenery” (1836). It was Emerson’s study of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, in the late 1820s, that helped him articulate these “strange sympathies” as oracular revelations.

In works such as New Jerusalem (1758), Swedenborg claimed that the apocalypse had occurred in 1757, and he prophesied that a new age and universal religion were on its way. In fact he understood the “New Jerusalem” of Revelation (in the Bible) to refer not to a literal city, but an epoch or era of history, a spiritual age.

In this new spiritual age, humans could experience the divine more closely and immediately than before. Instead of a mechanized, secular world of the Enlightenment, Swedenborg proposed that he was constantly surrounded by immense vitalism in nature. His vision of a garden became especially ripe with mystical overtones, a place where he and others could—like Adam and Eve—experience paradise once again.

In Heaven and Hell (1758), Swedenborg explains the significance of gardens and other spaces imbued with nature:

In the 2019 book A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination, David Zuber points out that Emerson was so fond of Swedenborg that he copied the exact passage above in his journal during the late 1820s. It would later inspired Emerson’s meditations on nature and his view that it (nature) could become a “mute gospel,” a “sacred emblem.”

Swedenborg believed that the Bible was written entirely in correspondence fashion, much like nature: nothing is literal, everything is a parable, even the history of Israel. He proposed an interpretation of Genesis, for example, which showed how it could be interpreted symbolically, as the spiritual transformation of every individual, not literally about how the world came into being.

Swedenborg developed the language of “correspondences” to help make sense of the relationship between the physical/concrete and spiritual/symbolic, the two levels of existence. God Creator corresponds to the World Created, the Mind corresponds to the Body, the Spiritual meaning to the Literal meaning, and Intention to Action. Even physical sensations have spiritual correspondences.

Eventually, Emerson worked out the idea that all original and truthful concepts have concrete physical equivalents. Right thinking is always embedded or represented by something concrete. Of course, this Emersonian translation of Swedenborg can in turn become interpreted from a purely aesthetic point of view to mean that all meaning or subjective feeling should have an objective equivalent—what T.S. Eliot would call an “objective correlative.” It’s good poetics. But in Swedenborg and Emerson it’s full of metaphysical ramifications. The spiritual and concrete manifestations are intimately connected, if we can see with the right eyes.

One of the longer-term legacies of Swedenborg (and Emerson) would be his influence on the late 19th-century New Thought movement (the origins of 20th-century positive psychology), Christian Science, and other Mind Cure movements. John S. Haller’s The History of New Thought: From Mind Cure to Positive Thinking and the Prosperity Gospel (2012) offers an excellent overview of these developments, from Swedenborg’s mystical “correspondences” to positive psychology.

Scholars have also noted some parallels between Swedenborg’s vision of multiple heavens (three tiers) and rejection of hell with Joseph Smith’s “Vision” in Hiram, Ohio that heaven has three tiers and that there is only a temporary hell.^[1][2]

In short, Swedenborg’s mystical framework has been massively influential on certain aspects of American culture.

Emerson and the Bhagavad-Gitā

Another influence on Emerson’s Transcendentalism was his fascination with Hindu scriptures, especially the Bhagavad-Gitā. P. Sengupta clarifies that Emerson’s father’s library was full of books containing Hindu texts, including Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah and J. Priestly’s A Comparison of the Institutions of Moses with Those of the Hindoos and Other Ancient Nations.^[3]

Sengupta explains that Charles Wilkins’s 1785 translation of the Bhagavad-Gitā was the first in the English language, and it had a massive effect on the broader Anglo-American intellectual circles. Emerson also read about the Hindu text in Victor Cousin’s history to philosophy; he even bought a copy of a Wilkins translation in 1845. In that same year Emerson published a poem titled “Brahma.”

Lines such as “Far or forgot to me is near,” “And one to me are shame and fame,” and “I am the doubter and the doubt” embrace paradoxes that are more typical of Hindu thinking than Western thought. And this paradoxical unity, or nullification of binaries, is what seems to attract Emerson to the Gitā. 

The Gitā focuses on Krishna, an avatar of the god Vishnu, who becomes the charioteer to Arjuna during the Kurukshetra War. Krishna agrees to serve as charioteer only he (Krishna) will not raise any weapon. When they go to battle, Arjuna sees his family and loved ones on the opposing side. He feels torn between opposing duties. Krishna then spends much of the text advising Arjuna about the nature of life, ethics, and morality when one is faced with a war between good and evil. It also famously discusses the impermanent of matter, the nature of true peace and bliss, and the different types of yoga required to reach this state of bliss and inner liberation.

Texts such as Emerson’s Nature (1836) are not obviously proposing Hindu ethics. But a number of his essays and poems do interweave Hindu influences with Swedenborgian mysticism in a unique synthesis not yet explored by an American writer. It led to an immensely creative output and would give rise to what scholars now consider to be a uniquely American canon of literature. Modern American poetry is heavily indebted to Emerson’s unique “syncretic” approach to philosophy and religion.

This is an oversimplification, but Emerson’s embrace of the Gitā leads to a great emphasis on non-binary thinking (rather than either-or, look for an attempt to transcend oppositions) and immediate access to the divine. The latter element also belongs to Swedenborg, of course, but the “yoga” of Gitā offers a nice heuristic for thinking about the Transcendentalist project more generally: Emerson and others can be seen as proposing a new “yoga” (a way, a discipline, a path) to help Americans become more authentic.

Emerson’s 1838 opposition to the 1830s Indian Removals

In 1830, President Jackson famously issued his “Indian Removal Act,” which planned for native tribes on the Eastern seaboard to be transplanted to the Western edge of what was then the frontier of the U.S. This infamously led to the “trail of tears,” starting in 1831.

In 1835, Emerson read in the newspapers that representatives from the Cherokee tribe weren’t actually representing the interests of their tribe when they agreed to terms related to the removal process. He and others viewed it as a sham. In 1838, Emerson published a “Letter to Martin Van Buren,” who carried out the removal policies after becoming president. In that letter Emerson argues forcefully for the recognition of the native rights:

In passages like this, we can begin to see the implications of Emerson’s Transcendentalist framework. Some of his essays sound obtuse, esoteric, and long-winded, but his vision of the intimate contact between every individual and the divine radically expands the democratic experiment. Whereas Jackson expected the natives to learn how to become Christian if they wanted to be part of the nation (or, otherwise, they would need to be contained to their reservations), Emerson’s underlying belief is that everyone is born close to the divine. For that reason, it’s a matter of justice and mercy to not forcibly remove the natives away from their tribal lands. Later, Emerson would also become an ardent abolitionist. Some of his disciples, such as Margaret Fuller, would become key figures in the fight for women’s rights.