Ralph Waldo Emerson Found His Poets in Whitman & Dickinson

At The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson examines the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, noting first that the tragic death of Emerson's son by scarlet fever at the age of five led to the writing of his famous essay, "Experience." "'Experience' has a knife’s-edge emergency intensity," writes Chiasson, "that is nowhere to be found in Emerson’s poems, collected in 'Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry' (Harvard), edited by Albert J. von Frank. Prose was a zone of fruitful conflict for Emerson, who began his public life writing sermons." More:

Emerson was not the poet he had in mind in “The Poet” [our link]. In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville had prophesied an American poetry free of “legendary lays,” “old traditions,” “supernatural beings,” masks, and personifications. Americans led “petty” and “insipid” lives, “crowded with paltry interests”: their lives were “anti-poetic.” The only subject possible for an American poet was humankind; luckily, as Tocqueville wrote, “the poet needs no more.” Emerson, who spent most of his life cultivating the aura of an elder, called for “a brood of Titans” who would “run up the mountains of the West with the errand of genius and love.”

In July of 1855, Emerson got the poet he’d been calling for. He picked up a parcel from the Concord post office which contained the first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” sent anonymously from Brooklyn by its author. The book was unsigned, though there was a frontispiece portrait, the name “Walter Whitman” on the copyright page, and, inside, the jubilant line “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos. ” After a little hunting, Emerson found Whitman’s name and the address of his distributor in a newspaper advertisement. He then wrote his famous letter to Whitman, welcoming him to immortality: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.”

In response, Whitman published the letter in the book’s next edition, along with twenty new poems and his own open letter to Emerson of several thousand words celebrating “that vast basis of the supremacy of Individuality—that new moral American continent” whose “shores you found”:

I say you have led The States there—have led Me there. I say that none has ever done, or ever can do, a greater deed for The States, than your deed. Others may line out the lines, build cities, work mines, break up farms; it is yours to have been the original true Captain who put to sea, intuitive, positive, rendering the first report, to be told less by any report, and more by the mariners of a thousand bays, in each tack of their arriving and departing, many years after you.

Read it all at The New Yorker.