Emerson's Prose Style

 Emerson’s Prose-Style 

Emerson is one of the greatest American essayists of the nineteenth century. He is quite different from the English like Addison, Lamb, Hazlitt, Arnold or Stevenson . He was primarily a philosophical thinker. He was a Transcendentalist. He believed that God pervades the whole universe.

The essays of English are short. But Emerson’s essays are very long. His essays are as a vast treaty of nature in which multitudes of argument and illustrations jostle one another for existence. On the basis of their form, his essays may be called Lectures. Some of them may be called treatises or orations. The body of his essay is vast. It contains various topics under the main title. The essay -- The American Scholars covers about fifteen pages. It talks about the major influence on the scholar, it discusses the duties of a scholar, it is in a way American intellectual declaration of independence '.

Emerson essays are loosely constructed. His paragraphs are not based on any logical sequences. The points of his thought are not related to one another by virtue of logical discussion. In 'the American scholar ' he tells first his readers that Americans should now make a declaration of literary Independence. Then he tells them that the American scholar should be a 'Man - thinking‘. Thereafter he describes the influence upon the mind of man. He was a great scholar. His vision was vast. As soon as he is in a position to complete a paragraph a new vision comes up and ideas form themselves into a circle.

Emerson's style for writing essays is philosophical. He writes “There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself”. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find,—so entire, so boundless”. Further , " A Man should learn to detect and watch the gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within’. 

Emerson’s prose-style is noted for its aphoristic quality and its epigrammatic terseness. The essay is with him, as with Bacon, a series of short, quotable assertions without the logical unity of the discourse, but all bound together by the intellectual atmosphere of the source from whence they proceed. Many of his sentences are remarkable for their force, subtlety, and impressiveness, and some for their poetic beauty. The imagery is of great range, from the sun and stars and down to the meanest weed or insect, and the diction is quaint and original but not in the least affected. “Man hopes. Genius creates”.

He has used a number of stylistic devices such as figures of speech, analogy, antithetically balanced sentences, epigrams, rhetorical etc. The use of these various devices can easily be illustrated from any of his essays – 

The perception of analogy also takes the less direct and more forceful form of metaphor. Literary fashions are seen as “the mere remains of foreign harvests.” He confidently expects a time, “when the intellect of this continent will look out from its iron lids.” The young scholar is, “a school boy under the bending dome of day.” Books are lamps to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is.

To the poet’s privilege of metaphor, Emerson adds the idealist’s prerogative of paradox, which is at once a way of seeing things as well as a way of saying them. It is a philosopher’s game, played with appearance and reality. Diversity and even contrariness are to him only a dramatic presentation of some great designs. “The drop is a small ocean,” “The near explains the far,” “One design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench”, and, of course, the most basic paradox of all is the one in which, “Everything that tends to insulate the individual ……tends to true union as well as greatness.”

Emerson reminds us often of Milton, especially in The American Scholar, by his eloquence, by the amplitude and sweep of his sentences, the rhythm and the poetry of his descriptions. He reminds us just as often of Bacon with his confident aphorisms. The fullness of the longer sentences is balanced by the sharpness of epigram and the greatness of antithesis. He has a whole series of antithetically balanced sentences, where he describes how experience becomes truth and art in the crucible of the scholar’s mind. Readily noticeable also is the skilful use of rhetorical devices, like inversion, repetition or interrogation. “Emerson has the poet’s ear for the music of words, and something even of the more obvious phonetic and musical satisfaction of verse may be found in Emerson’s prose. Apart from the usual balancing of sound with the sense, characteristic of the antithetical construction, we notice also the devices of rhythm, the balancing of sound through repetition and contrast in passages. With Emerson prose is the other harmony, i.e. poetry. He is one of the greatest writers of poetic-prose. His sentences have the rhythm and cadence of poetry. Such as

“It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires”.

According to a noted critic, it is idle to analyse Emerson’s style, if we think of style as meaning order and arrangement: for his method of writing—by stringing together selections from his note-books—made it impossible that his works should have any continuity of thought or unity of expression. But if we think of style simply as manner, as the reflection of personality, and then consider Emerson’s most characteristic paragraphs which suggest stars, flowers and glimmering crystals, then there is no style to compare with his in our literature.

There can be no denying the fact that Emerson is one of the greatest prose-stylists in the English language, but he also has glaring faults and short-comings. He lacked the gift of sustained construction. His style is best illustrated in selected passages. The sentences are terse, vital, epigrammatic; yet they are always poetic rather than practical, and always hint at much more than they express. Because he lives much out of doors and is intimate with earth, air and water, Emerson’s figures have an elemental quality unlike those of any other writer. 

The dew and fragrance of the morning are in all his works. Because he has read widely he gives an air of culture to the most homely matters by associating them with the great characters and the great books of the world. He has a large vocabulary at perfect command, but his instinct leads him to the simplest and most picturesque words. He chooses his expressions from the most unexpected places, here from the nursery, there from the Apocalypse or from the mystic books of the East; and not even Lowell approaches him in the ability to clothe his thought in a new dress, making its appeal as fresh and original as if it had been spoken in Eden at the springtime of the world.

Emerson is always striving after eloquence of expression, not to convince his hearers—such a personal motive would never occur to him—but simply because it is in his blood, because eloquence seems to him Man’s natural expression, his unconscious reflection of his harmony with the universe.

 A number of critics are of the view that Emerson, the essayist, is not the artist. In the opinion of Spiller, Emerson is - “a writer who is artistic but not an artist ". Emerson is said to have got no sense of composition. He is accused of writing loose sentences with no sense of syntax .When he starts elaborating his ideas his sense of form disappears and continuation becomes illogical, incoherence is the result of it all. Emerson’s prose has something beautiful style, something dangling. A critic says about his essays that they are - " a chaos full of shooting stars " To find his style , we may conclude him as a great scholar and a great Thinker . 

His essays are replete with his wisdom. He was an intellectual, a deep Thinker and an eloquent speaker .

Perhaps the most fitting commentary on their relationship to Indian literature was made by Gandhi after reading Emerson’s essays: “The essays to my mind contain the teaching of Indian wisdom in a western ‘genre’. It is interesting to see our own sometimes differently fashioned.”   

Emerson: An Essayist

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Seriesand Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.

Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic; "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul."

While his writing style has been considered impenetrable by some, Emerson's essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking, and Emerson's work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that have followed him. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man." Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of fellowTranscendentalist Henry David Thoreau.

Emerson anonymously published his first essay, Nature, on September 9, 1836. A year later, on August 31, 1837, Emerson delivered his now-famousPhi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar", then known as "An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge"; it was renamed for a collection of essays (which included the first general publication of "Nature") in 1849. Friends urged him to publish the talk, and he did so, at his own expense, in an edition of 500 copies, which sold out in a month.[1] In the speech, Emerson declared literary independence in the United States and urged Americans to create a writing style all their own and free from Europe.James Russell Lowell, who was a student at Harvard at the time, called it "an event without former parallel on our literary Emerson's religious views were often considered radical at the time. He believed that all things are connected to God and, therefore, all things are divine. Critics believed that Emerson was removing the central God figure; as Henry Ware, Jr. said, Emerson was in danger of taking away "the Father of the Universe" and leaving "but a company of children in an orphan asylum".  Emerson was partly influenced by German philosophy and Biblical criticism. ] His views, the basis of Transcendentalism, suggested that God does not have to reveal the truth but that the truth could be intuitively experienced directly from nature.annals". Another member of the audience, Reverend John Pierce, called it "an apparently incoherent and unintelligible address".

It was in 1841 that Emerson published Essays, his second book, which included the famous essay, "Self-Reliance". His aunt called it a "strange medley of atheism and false independence", but it gained favorable reviews in London and Paris. This book, and its popular reception, more than any of Emerson's contributions to date laid the groundwork for his international fame.]

Emerson was introduced to Indian philosophy when reading the works of French philosopher Victor Cousin.[92] In 1845, Emerson's journals show he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas. Emerson was strongly influenced by the Vedas, and much of his writing has strong shades of nondualism. One of the clearest examples of this can be found in his essay "The Over-soul":

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. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.[94]

As a lecturer and orator, Emerson—nicknamed the Concord Sage—became the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States

Emerson's work not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present. Notable thinkers who recognize Emerson's influence include Nietzsche andWilliam James, Emerson's godson.

Emerson presupposes that the mind is initially subject to an unhappy conformism.

Self-Reliance is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s compilation of many years’ works and the archetype for his transcendental philosophies. Throughout the essay he gives a defense for his famous catch-phrase “trust thyself.” This argument follows three major points: the self-contained genius, the disapproval of the world, and the value of self-worth.

Throughout this essay, Emerson argues against conformity with the world. He gives an archetype for his own transcendental beliefs, but also argues for his slogan “trust thyself.” For someone to transcend their current state, one must lean only on their own understanding, hold a certain level of disregard for the opinions and currents of society, and most importantly hold a respect for self regardless of circumstances and society's opinions.