82 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “moment of transition” and modern poetics

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a more detailed account of Emerson’s poetics than “Ralph Waldo Emerson and American Transcendentalism.” Whereas that chapter offered a general historical introduction to his life and thought, this chapter looks more closely at the rhetoric and style of his famous essays, especially Nature (1836) and “Self-Reliance” (1841). It argues that Emerson’s Transcendentalist view of nature as a constant flux and process shaped his prose, and that this emphasis on process is key to appreciating later developments in American poetics. American literature remains highly Emersonian, in some ways.

Emerson’s 1841 Essays

In his first major work, Nature (1836), he adopted a Swedenborgian framework to declare himself a kind of prophet of nature. Whereas Paul had a vision on the road to Damascus, Emerson had a vision in a garden in 1833, with strong Swedenborgian overtones:

Here we are impressed with the inexhaustible riches of nature. The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms,–the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes,–& the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer,–an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me—cayman, carp, eagle, & fox. I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually, “I will be a naturalist.” (JMN 4:199-200)

This passage famously proposes the “occult relation” he experiences with nature. Emerson’s Swedenborgianism and his 1833 experience would lead him to break with the Unitarian Church and orthodox Christianity more generally.

In the late 1830s he began building a network of like-minded Transcendentalists. In July 1839, Emerson was in consistent contact with Margaret Fuller and H.D. Thoreau, both of whom were later involved with his magazine The Dial, which started in 1840 as a hub for Transcendentalists. Emerson had already published major works, especially Nature, but up to this point in his career he hadn’t yet established himself as a major writer.

He dabbled in poetry and didn’t view it as his forte. But it did help him notice that he preferred a certain style of repetition: “the iteration of the sense as in Milton’s “Though fallen on evil days / On evil days though fallen and evil tongues.” It became clear to Emerson that It wasn’t rhyme he was after, but a particular rhythm and style. This was transferable to prose, not just poetry.

During this period of exploration during the late 1830s he was also in charge of publishing Thomas Carlyle’s Miscellaneous Essays.

According to Richardson’s Mind on Fire, by now Emerson had collected substantial material based on sermons, lectures, and his journal notebooks. But his publishing process was slow, according to Richardson, often dedicating months on just a single essay.

Then, in 1839, he began his first essay book project, one comparable to Montaigne or Bacon’s masterpieces, “on topics of general human interest,” Richardson explains. After tinkering with a few strategies, he began using his journals to “record his thoughts and impressions as they first struck him … .” He didn’t aim to be systematic, but rather allowed his notebooks to become full of “disjointed dreams” and other random thoughts, in addition to highlights and quotes from his readings.

Gradually, he conceived of his essay project as a process of curating his best journal material. In a separate notebook, he began listing topics covered by separate entries, then began noting where his journals touched on each one (e.g., “Intellect,” “Swedenborg”). He finally began working up this material into more cohesive essays. In 1841 he published his first collection of essays, titled Essays (Fig. 1.). It began with an essay called “History,” followed by “Self-Reliance.”

Emerson’s prose style: metalepsis, hyperbaton, anaphora

One of the keys to understanding Emerson’s prose style in the 1841 Essays is the binary of stasis | process. This binary emerges from Emerson’s reading of nature as highly processual, i.e., a matter of evolving processes, the opposite of stasis. Emerson’s Transcendentalism was partly inspired by the same intellectual reservoirs as the hypnotists and spiritualists of the 19th-century who emphasized the magnetism and electricity bonding all things in Nature (Fig. 1).

The occult relation Emerson experienced in the Parisian garden in 1833 is, for him, about a certain rhythm, energy, and movement. Becoming a “naturalist,” for Emerson, is about joining the movement of Life/Being.

Much like St. Paul of the Christian Bible, Emerson sees himself as a converted visionary, one whose mission is to convert others readers to the new vision that he was granted. With this lens in mind, it can be helpful to read his essays as sermons attempting to provide conversion experiences for readers. To accomplish this feat, he adopts a prose style appropriate to his magnetic, processual view of nature. The prose style of the 1841 Essays adopts a number of rhetorical strategies outlined by the excellent article, “‘Terrible Simplicity’: Emerson’s Metaleptic Style,” by Eric Wilson.^[1]

Troping: According to Wilson, one principle of his electric style comes from the belief that language, like nature, is continually troped. In “The Poet” he argues: “Nature itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are tropes. As the bird alights on the bough, then plunges into the air again, so the thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form.” This means that, for something to mean anything, it must continually dart towards new expressions and figures. This troping also suggests why Emerson views religious dogma as something to be opposed—traditional orthodoxy, Emerson argues, relies on stasis, on fixing images to certain ideas.^[2]

Metalepsis: Wilson suggests that “metalepsis” is Emerson’s master trope. Quintilian’s rhetorical treatise dismissed metalepsis because it mixes more than one metaphor. But Emerson frequently deploys this strategy in his essays, in dense passages Wilson calls “sublime,” “places where several figures, tropes, and allusions are fused.” Wilson explains:

“Metalepsis” derives from metalambano, which covers a wide range of meanings: “to partake in, succeed to, exchange, take in a new way, take in another sense [of words], and even to explain or understand … Patristic Greek primarily used the word to mean ‘to interpret’ in the sense of translating or transferring from a literal to a spiritual level. Quintilian translated the word to the Latin transumptio—’to adopt’ or ‘to assume,’ which is the basis of the English ‘transumption,’ which as mean, since the fifteenth century, a ‘copy or quotation’; ‘transfer or translation’; ‘transmutation or conservation’ (134).”^[3]

“Take in another sense” is probably the most accessible way to think about metalepsis. It’s also helpful to think of metalepsis in contrast to typology. Whereas typology alludes to a past event or figure (the type) to make sense of a new event or figure (the antitype), metalepsis sometimes alludes to earlier figures in a way that completely revises them. Wilson points to a Satan’s spear in Milton’s Paradise Lost as a key example of metalepsis: the original, “to equal which the tallest Pine / Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast / Of some great Admiral, were but a wand” (1.292-94), alludes to the club of Polyphemous in Homer’s Odyssey, the club of Goliath, and the pines of Ovid’s Golden Age in the Metamorphoses, “in which pines still rooted in the earth, unlike Satan’s uprooted tree, symbolizes unspoiled innocence”. Satan becomes imbued with all of these literary resemblances, and the tree he wields transcends all of them, pushing towards something new.^[4]

Textual allusions can be diachronic (across time) or synchronic (within the same time). In both cases, metalepsis tends to layer allusions and tropes, linking them together in a series of chains that work by mere association.^[5] This layering of allusions—tending towards something completely new—is what tends to make Emerson’s prose feel so elliptical but also hypnotic.

Hyperbaton: Another rhetorical strategy Emerson uses is hyperbaton, an inversion of normal syntax. Wilson points to the expression “Almost I fear to think how glad I am,” from Nature, which inverts the normal expression, “I almost fear.” The slight transposition of “almost” in the sentence emphasizes the liminal nature of Emerson’s experience—meaning is to be found at thresholds and crossings, at the “almost” of boundaries, never exactly at them.^[6] To convey this liminal experience, Emerson adopts a disjunctive, occasionally tortured syntax.

Anaphora: Repeating words or phrases successively, called anaphora, also contributes to the sublimity of Emerson’s style. Wilson points out that Longinus (the classical Greek author famous for authoring a treatise on the sublime) favors anaphora because it “advances sublimity by ‘striking the mind’ of the reader, ‘by the swift succession of blow on blow’ (101).” In Nature, Emerson anaphorically repeats: “In the woods, … a man … is a child,” “In the woods, is perpetual youth,” “In the woods, we return to reason and faith.”^[7] Paradoxically, this subtle form of repetition works in tandem with the “turning” of metalepsis. The prose is both churning, mixing, and linking different images while also hammering at the reader’s consciousness through repetition.

“Self-Reliance”: Beyond dogma—and egotism

It’s sometimes hard for 21st-century readers to read “Self-Reliance” and not come away with the sense that it merely reinforces American individualism and the 21st-century narcissism. However, that’s a highly anachronistic reading that completely ignores the Transcendentalist framework.

“Self-Reliance” does famously advocate for a kind of individualism, one not in conformity with social conventions. However, Richardson clarifies what Emerson means by “individualism”: “The essay is not a blueprint for selfishness or withdrawal; it is not anti-community. It recommends self-reliance as a starting point—indeed the starting point—not as a goal.” Authentic community is a society of individuals who are properly grounded. Furthermore, “Self-Reliance” is complemented by “The Oversoul,” which focuses on the extent to which what makes individuals authentic is a “common nature,” a “universal mind.” The more someone taps into this hidden force, the more authentically individual they become. Here’s a passage from “Over-Soul,” from 1841:

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty. 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.

This passage is heavily imbued with Swedenborg’s mysticism. As you read “Self-Reliance,” keep passages like this in mind. “The Oversoul” sounds like the opposite of individualism, but Emerson sees them as perfectly compatible.

An authentic individual is an oracle of being, Emerson argues, not simply an adolescent who bristles at the earliest sign of authority.

Moment of transition

One of the lasting legacies of Emerson’s poetics, especially in essays like “Self-Reliance,” is the emphasis on process. The famous line in “Self-Reliance” has inspired a tome of art and scholarship:

What does it mean that power is in “transition”? Authentic language is, like the self and its grounding in the processes of nature, a matter of energy and force. What that looks like requires some unpacking. In fact it might be helpful to view Emerson’s entire oeuvre as an attempt to unravel the paradoxes that emerge from viewing the self, nature, and language as a matter of processes and movement rather than fixed meanings.

But careful students of literature can also use this Emersonian framework to think about emerging 19th-century debates over what the United States should look like, such as how to understand the Declaration of Independence and its Constitution—the latter of which explicitly acknowledged the centrality of slavery to the young nation. Was, then, the U.S. defined by its origins (its “repose”)? Or, as writers such as Frederick Douglass would later argue, would these founding documents merely contain principles that had not yet been fully realized? The second reading emphasizes the nation as a process, a “moment of transition” that would never rest. Emersonian poetics could be leveraged for political purposes.