Encounters

In the winter and spring of 1867, Ralph Waldo Emerson travelled westward on a speaking tour across a still war-weary America. He delivered lectures at lyceums, town halls, and churches in fast-growing cities like Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis, as well as in smaller out-of-the-way towns like Battle Creek, Michigan; Lacon, Illinois; or Lawrence, Kansas. Although over sixty years old, he followed a rigorous schedule – he would deliver eighty lectures in 1867 across fourteen states – but extensive lecturing was not a new practice for Emerson.¹ Indeed, following his departure from the ministry in 1832, and notwithstanding the annual sum he was paid by his deceased first wife’s estate, he had relied on lecturing as a primary means to earn his living. In so doing, he built an international reputation not only as an essayist and a poet, but as one of America’s preeminent public intellectuals and literary figures, a reputation that has arguably only increased since his death in 1882.

But two stops during his winter 1867 western tour deserve special mention and can help orient this New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson. First, across a frozen, snow-packed Midwest en route to St. Paul, he made a side trip to an encampment of Santee Sioux people (most likely to the Mdewakanton, a subgroup of the Isanti (Santee) Dakota (Sioux)) near Faribault, Minnesota. It is not clear whether Emerson headed there following the example of his friend and fellow Concord poet-philosopher, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau had travelled to Minnesota in 1861 shortly before his untimely death in 1862 at forty-five years old, seeking to learn as much as he could about the local Indigenous peoples. For his part, Emerson made just a brief excursion, escorted by the grandson of the town’s namesake and founder, Jean-Baptiste Faribault, whose family was of mixed French Canadian and Dakota descent. In a letter dated February 1, 1867, Emerson describes the visit to his daughter, Ellen, to whom he wrote regularly during his lecture tours and who handled much of the day-to-day activities of his financial affairs:

There is, quite clearly, an element of staged spectacle or cultural-anthropological tourism at play here in Emerson’s visit. The Santee Sioux people are seemingly on display for the touring preeminent white intellectual. Emerson’s rhetoric in the letter, what is more, repeats stereotypical ways of describing Indigenous peoples, setting the “Aborigines” in a “wild piece of timber”; he admits to mistaking their gender twice; he begs for them to perform for him; and he laments the seeming inauthenticity of the “Indian picture” insofar as they use a modern kerosene lamp and not one of more “natural” birch-bark or pine-knot to light their living spaces. Furthermore, Emerson does not indicate here the extent to which he would have known the traumatic recent history of the people he was visiting. The “Dakota Wars” raged just a few years before in 1862 and were among the bloodiest confrontations between the US Army and North America’s Indigenous peoples. The wars culminated in the largest mass execution in US history, when thirty-eight of three hundred Dakota sentenced to death were hanged by the government.⁴ More would have died, but President Lincoln commuted the sentences of many of them, condemning the remainder to the gallows. Alexander Faribault, the father of Emerson’s guide, served as translator for the Dakota and they were currently encamped on land he claimed as his own, but his family had also gained financially when the treaties he had helped to negotiate were broken.

We can only speculate on the extent to which Emerson knew of this violent context. His misrecognizing young women for young men runs against his awareness that many of the men had been removed to Nebraska, but he does not mention also that many had been killed in battle or later executed. But it is clear from the letter that, in the wake of these wars, on the lands of which they had been dispossessed, settler-colonial cities and towns and large-scale infrastructures – such as the railroads, communication networks, and industrial, commercial, and banking systems that made Emerson’s trip possible – were being constructed rapidly. Yet there is also a tone of sadness in Emerson’s muted registration of the fact that he could not see “such another Indian picture between that spot & Boston,” a muted registration of forced removal and white settler-colonialist violence toward Indigenous peoples which had taken place for centuries, eradicating their presence almost completely. Emerson would have been attuned to the terminology of “removal,” which he uses here in referring to the warriors having been “removed to Nebraska” as a consequence of the Dakota Wars. Thirty years before, in 1838, he had written one of the most powerful letters in American political history to President Martin Van Buren protesting the Cherokee Removal. In that letter, he calls removal “a crime” that “confounds our understandings by its magnitude, – a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country.” Directly denouncing Van Buren in scathing terms, he concludes: “You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.”⁵ This letter culminates Emerson’s young commitment to fighting the injustice of Indigenous removal, begun as early as 1819 when as a student at Harvard he debated the question of whether “the conduct of the U.S. towards the Indians can be reconciled to the principles of justice and humanity?” – and to which he concluded it could not be.⁶ Yet that the letter to Ellen Emerson in 1867 – which of course is a piece of private correspondence and not a political text – does not come close to this earlier heightened tone nonetheless points to Emerson’s often contradictory politics. And what is more, as Drew Lopenzina and Laura L. Mielke have asked, to what extent did Emerson “speak for ‘the Indian’” anyway, or imagine a real Indigenous presence?⁷

There is not space here to explore Emerson’s complex and inconsistent relationship to US settler-colonialism and Indigenous peoples’ removal and genocide in any great depth. But suffice it to say for the sake of introducing this new collection of critical texts on Emerson’s life and work, that the letter raises key questions regarding how he advocated – or didn’t advocate – for some of the pressing social and political causes of his day. Indeed, understanding the political dimensions of Emerson’s thought in his own time – and for our time – is one of the key areas of Emerson’s work that this New Cambridge Companion seeks to explore. As such, its contributors engage questions related to Emerson’s writings and lectures on democracy and race, antislavery and women’s rights activism, Asian American immigration, and nature and ecology, and offer trenchant reconsiderations of Emerson’s complex notion of the “times” in which he lived. The enduring question regarding Emerson’s political involvements, that is, is always related to what he calls the question of how to live – how to conduct one’s life – in one’s own historical moment. As he says in his essay “Fate,” “To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?” (CW 6: 1).

Before I provide a fuller overview of some of the contributors’ interventions, I would like to juxtapose Emerson’s visit to the Santee Sioux (and the complex political Emerson it evokes) with a second scene, and with it a different, complex philosophical Emerson that also emerges from the same tour. Across the midwestern United States, Emerson delivered lectures called “Man of the World,” “Social Aims,” “Resources,” “Inspiration,” or “Eloquence” (many of which would appear, in one form or another, in his later books Society and Solitude (1870) and Letters and Social Aims (1875)). A few weeks after visiting the Santee Sioux, and after giving further lectures in Minneapolis, Fond du Lac, Des Moines, or Chicago, Emerson stopped in St. Louis to visit a group of philosophers who had taken up the banner of G. W. F. Hegel in America and would thus become known as the “St. Louis Hegelians.” Emerson had come to St. Louis at the invitation of one of their leading figures, William Torrey Harris, who had founded the influential Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1867 – a journal that would not only publish key translations and criticism on Hegel but also some of the early works of American pragmatist philosophers like William James and John Dewey. Emerson had also come at the urging of his friend and fellow Concord writer A. Bronson Alcott, who would later convene the Concord School of Philosophy, bringing Harris to Massachusetts in the 1870s.

Understanding Emerson’s relation to Hegel – and his stop to visit the St. Louis Hegelians – can help give a sense of Emerson’s relation to philosophy and his intellectual historical milieu more generally. To begin with, Emerson had encountered German philosophy through a variety of sources, and German Idealism, in particular, had played a profound, if understated, role in shaping the intellectual agenda of Emerson’s nineteenth-century milieu. German Idealism was part of a larger American transformation of Anglo-European Romantic philosophies, and some of its central questions found sympathetic reformulations in Emerson’s philosophy. In brief, these questions are centered on the problems of how to unify mind and nature, faith and knowledge, fate and freedom, and the conduct of life and the moral sentiment. Through his engagement with these questions, Emerson responded to the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant and to the “identity philosophy” of Friedrich Schelling, which he had absorbed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and the French eclectic philosopher Victor Cousin. And, as was the case with his close friend, editor, translator, writer, and intellectual Margaret Fuller, Emerson had strong affinities with the novelist, poet, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (affinities expressed in his essay devoted to Goethe in his book Representative Men (1850)). Like that of Goethe, the keynote of Emerson’s philosophy is, arguably, metamorphosis. To a large extent, Emerson’s work could be said to be devoted to bearing witness to and celebrating nature’s fluxes, transformations, and transitions; or, as he writes in his essay “Poetry and Imagination,” the “endless passing of one element into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis” (CW 8: 7–8). In its totalizing claims, Hegel’s Absolute Idealism purported to overcome the Cartesian and Kantian dualisms of mind and matter and the noumenal and phenomenal and thus to culminate German Idealism. Hegel’s philosophy of nature, deemed “monstrous” by Goethe, offered a rigid conceptual system for thinking of metamorphosis as the rhythmic unfolding of nature and the passage of subjective spirit into objective spirit.⁸

In a journal passage dated 1866, the year before he visited St. Louis, Emerson noted the power of Hegel’s thought:

Despite his recognition of Hegel’s importance, Emerson was by no means an adherent of his philosophy. Indeed, his self-reliant thinking is marked by its aversiveness to philosophical systems or settled doctrines. And Emerson’s knowledge of Hegel was for the most part gleaned from Hegel’s commentators and summarizers rather than from direct and rigorous study of his texts and tenets. Emerson relied on conversations with his Concord contemporaries Emmanuel V. Scherb, Frederic Henry Hedge, James Elliot Cabot, and, indeed, W. T. Harris, and on philosophical compendia like J. B. Stallo’s General Principles of the Philosophy of Nature (1848), Jean Chrétien Ferdinand Hoefer’s Biographie universelle (1852), and James Hutchinson Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel (1865).⁹ It was in this context, then, that, later in 1867, Emerson wrote to Harris requesting that he might teach him “the true value & performance of Hegel, who, at first sight is not engaging nor at second sight satisfying. But his immense fame cannot be mistaken and I shall read & wait” (L 5: 521).

His spring 1867 lecture to the St. Louis Hegelians differed from his other lecture stops on the tour, then, insofar as he came to St. Louis to learn from his auditors as much as to share his own philosophy with them. In a letter to his close friend Henry James Sr., Emerson remarked that it was a “true gratification to see Harris at St. Louis among the German Atheists.” However, as he quickly added, “They did not wish to see or hear me at all, but that I should see and hear them” (L 5: 514). Emerson seemed more amused than offended, and, for his part, Henry James Sr. quipped that “It was very nice of you to cohabit with those St. Louis chickens.”¹⁰ As Emerson’s twentieth-century biographer Ralph L. Rusk summarizes the visit in his The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Emerson’s visit is noteworthy not merely as evidence of his continued status as a revered public intellectual in the postbellum period. It also shows him to be a lifelong student of the “transition of thought to thought” (JMN 10: 143) – and one who sought to be attuned to the emergence of new philosophies that might speak to new times. Emerson was never a static thinker. He was one ready to leave behind his previous suppositions, to shift his epistemological bases, to have his curiosity stirred. “Leave your theory,” he urges us in “Self-Reliance” (CW 2: 33). “Who leaves all receives more,” he advises in “Intellect”:

As such, his living mind is a leaving mind marked by such departures. He wrestles with Plato and Neoplatonism, Swedenborg and Kant, Coleridge and Cousin, and, finally, Hegel, and he lets them go.

So, despite a broad appreciation for Hegel, Emerson found Hegel’s philosophical terminology largely “unintelligible” (see Wellek 55). And as one who claims he “reads for the lustres” (as he reminds us in his essay “Nominalist and Realist” (CW 3: 137)), Emerson characteristically devoted himself less to understanding the details of Hegel’s system than to letting Hegel stir the fires of his imagination. So if Emerson was receptive to Hegel’s thought, and if he indirectly contributed to his nineteenth-century Anglo-American reception, he would likewise leave Hegel behind in the name of finding his own thinking. As he writes in his journal:

Across the last decades of his working life – and in his own “idle & easy” way – Emerson sought to outline his own system: what he called his “Natural History of the Intellect” project, a project that was ultimately unfinished. It would have been the culminating statement of the self-reliant, aversive thinking that Emerson had long celebrated, a nonsystematic poetic thinking of a wholly different philosophical character than Hegel’s speculative system. So even if the idealist idea of the power of life is supposed to have found its fullest articulation in Hegel’s Absolute Idealism, Emerson resists such a complete ordering of life as understood through the Idea (der Begriff – also “concept” or “notion”). Likewise, Hegel’s formulations of questions of matter and mind, faith and knowledge, fate and freedom, and history and the evolution of natural forms would remain dissatisfying to Emerson. In his late lecture “Powers of the Mind,” he declares that he hates “dialectics and logomachies” and seeks instead a metaphysics “perpetually reinforced by life” (SL 237). His living thinking is a thinking in transit and transition, a thinking of metamorphosis and change. Emerson thus prefigures later process philosophers who would likewise resist Hegel: his intellectual (and actual) godson William James, his great German reader Friedrich Nietzsche (who found in Emerson a “brother soul”¹¹), as well as John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze. As a philosophical, religious, poetic, aesthetic, or political thinker, Emerson refused to synthesize his thought into digestible axiomatic formulas. Rather, it is in the ensemble of pulsating words that form into paratactic sentences, and in paratactic sentences that form into fluid essays, that Emerson’s beauty and power lie.

Transitional, Transnational Emerson

These were just two stops on a busy lecture tour. But his visits to the Santee Sioux and to the St. Louis Hegelians in 1867 nonetheless signal several important and complex aspects of Emerson’s writing and reputation that this New Cambridge Companion seeks to capture and to explore further – aspects that set it apart from the earlier and still relevant Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris in 1999. First, while the center of gravity of interest in Emerson’s work remains his early lectures like “The American Scholar,” his first book Nature, and seminal essays such as “Self-Reliance,” “The Poet,” “Experience,” or “Fate,” the New Cambridge Companion registers how critical attention to his work has expanded to include the whole of Emerson’s lecturing and writing life, including his final phase of work. Critical attention to his later lectures and writings – nominally those following the publication of his 1860 The Conduct of Life – has been greatly facilitated by the publication of newly edited volumes in the Harvard Belknap’s Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, namely Society and Solitude (2008; first published 1870), Letters and Social Aims (2010, first published 1875), as well as his Poems: A Variorum Edition (2011) and Uncollected Prose Writings (2013). And, thanks to the assiduous and dedicated editorial work of Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, we now have to hand curated collections of his later lectures, providing a more complete picture of how Emerson used the spoken forum to develop his thinking.¹² With this in mind, Christopher Hanlon’s Emerson’s Memory Loss (Oxford 2018) rereads Emerson’s work retrospectively; he offers fresh interpretations of how Emerson’s later texts, affected by his incipient dementia, were collaboratively curated (and even coauthored) – with figures like Emerson’s daughter Ellen Emerson central and not incidental to their textual production.

So in addition to rethinking the first half of Emerson’s career, this New Cambridge Companion seeks to put it into relief by engaging the full span of Emerson’s work. This invites us to consider Emerson not only as the antebellum icon of the “American Renaissance” but, as his tireless schedule of speaking events in 1867 attests, also as a public intellectual active into the postbellum period and a transitional figure who maintained a finger on the pulse of American intellectual and political developments through the 1860s and 1870s. His westward travel, it is important to note, was facilitated by the contemporaneous development of American settler-colonial infrastructural networks. As the railroads pushed west and new cities emerged from the prairies, Emerson traveled to these places to lecture and to meet with groups like the Santee Sioux and the St. Louis Hegelians. Considering his relationship to the “times,” then, as Jeffrey Insko argues in his chapter that opens the volume, is both to situate Emerson in intellectual and socio-political milieus in which he found himself and also to register the multiple and often conflicting ways of experiencing time that such new technologies and infrastructures in the nineteenth century brought to bear. Sean Ross Meehan’s chapter, “Emerson’s Late Styles,” adds to this picture of the intellectual vitality of late Emerson. Meehan explores how Emerson’s central rhetorical figurations of metonymy, analogy, and translation evidence his continued engagement in aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical matters beyond the 1850s, in works such as “Eloquence,” “Poetry and Imagination,” “Quotation and Originality,” and his unfinished “Natural History of Intellect.”

Reimagining Emerson as a tirelessly travelling lecturer crossing a still-fragmented post-Civil War America, and crossing new philosophical, intellectual, and political topographies, complicates the prevailing picture of him as a genius but aloof “Sage of Concord” busy penning odes to the powers of the intellect. That picture of Emerson has been caricatured by C. P. Cranch as a “transparent eyeball” or by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a “beacon [of intellectual fire] burning on a hill-top.”¹³ It is not just that Emerson channels the “vast flowing vigor” (CW 3: 42) of the universe he celebrates in his essay “Experience” into written literary form. Instead, it paints him as one who evolved his ideas in dialogue with public audiences across the US and abroad and endeavored to make a living by doing so. Orality and exchange also mark the form and content of his essays, which Tom F. Wright cannily explores in his contribution in this volume in terms of the concept of the “voiced essay.” To be sure, one could catalogue the instances of reported speech in his essays, themselves a concert of quotations, a concert of consonant and dissonant voices. Often, too, we can note how Emerson was essaying (literally “trying out”) his essays as lectures, a compositional practice that forms part of a larger organic process with his journal, notebook, and letter writing. One could certainly trace how ideas and phrases emerge in his notebooks and journals, find utterance in his sermons and lectures, and then achieve something of a finished form in his published essays and poems. Yet this was by no means an exclusively linear process. And even Emerson’s published writing invariably retains a sense of dynamic irresolution, of process, of collaboration, of life. What he says of Montaigne’s essays is true of his own living language: “Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive” (CW 4: 95).

This expanded sense of the span and geography of Emerson’s work has us broaden his place in American literary and intellectual history. Of course, he is rightfully considered to be one of the lodestars of Transcendentalism, even as that moniker arguably obscures the diversity of literary, theological, philosophical, and political positions of its practitioners. Any sense of Transcendentalism as an exclusively autochthonous American movement – even given Emerson’s own occasional literary nationalist pronouncements – likewise risks submerging its transnational dialogues with British and German Romanticisms.¹⁴ But as Jennifer J. Baker explores here in Chapter 3, Emerson’s calls for American literary or cultural independence were not in fact contrary to his pronounced admiration for (and adaptations of) the writing and thinking of Anglo-European Romantics like Goethe, Coleridge, Carlyle, or Wordsworth, but rather deepened and empowered the notions of genius and originality that underwrote the type of transnational “mode of perception” his work sought to inaugurate. As Devin Zuber’s chapter examines, Emerson’s lifelong sense of spirituality as living, felt, and guided by the moral sentiment was inflected by German theologians and philosophers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, or Ludwig Feuerbach (and, indeed, his brother William Emerson, who had encountered the German “Higher Criticism” while studying in Göttingen) – as well as by his eclectic readings in religious anthropology, Vedantic philosophy, Buddhism, or mystical Sufism. While David LaRocca critically examines transatlantic concepts of race and nationality in Emerson’s 1856 book English Traits, Spencer Tricker, in his chapter “Emerson, Asia, and the ‘Progress of Culture,’” looks the other direction to explore the complexities of Emerson’s depictions of transpacific exchange. On the one hand, not unlike Zuber, Tricker argues that Emerson’s cosmopolitan and universalist conceptions of Asian religion, art, and philosophy reinforce his Transcendentalist sense of morality. But at the same time, Emerson’s geographical and historical representations of Asian cultures and peoples also complexly approach prevailing nationalist, imperialist, historically determinist, and racist views of Asian cultures and people. Nonetheless, as Tricker shows, Emerson’s stylistic and epistemological inconsistency in representing Asia does not neatly reproduce the two sides of the stereotypical Orientalist coin. Rather, it offers a disunified and nonmonolithic “Asia” that subtly subverts Western notions of stadialist progress.

When the first Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson came out in 1999, scholars and graduate students were primarily reading him along the lines of the New Americanists. Since the turn of the millennium, one key shift in focus in Emerson studies has been away from historicist and biographically inflected criticism to one more attuned to philosophical approaches. These approaches built on landmark philosophical readings of Emerson by Stanley Cavell, who placed Emerson’s aversive thinking in relation to Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and American pragmatism, and by Sharon Cameron, who further deemphasized Emerson’s status as the proponent of “self-reliance” through her striking essays on impersonality in “Representing Grief: Emerson’s ‘Experience’” and “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal,” both later collected in her book Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago 2007). In her monumental On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard 2010), Branka Arsić further explored notions of mourning and abandonment in Emerson and sounded new key tones in Emerson’s writing in relation to vitalism and materialism. Together, Cavell, Cameron, and Arsić have influenced a generation of philosophical readers of Emerson, as well as scholars of ecocritical, posthumanist, and new materialist approaches. From other perspectives, John T. Lysaker’s Emerson and Self-Culture (Indiana 2008); Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (Verso 2013); Thomas Constantinesco and Sophie Laniel-Musitelli’s coedited volume, Romanticism and Philosophy: Thinking with Literature (Routledge 2015); Joseph Urbas’s Emerson’s Metaphysics A Song of Laws and Causes (Lexington 2016) and The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Routledge 2021); Herwig Friedl’s Thinking in Search of a Language (Bloomsbury 2019); Benedetta Zavatta’s Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson (Oxford 2019); Sharon Cameron’s The Likeness of Things Unlike: A Poetics of Incommensurability (Chicago 2025); and Russell Goodman’s Emerson, the Philosopher of Oppositions (Cambridge 2025) have likewise reoriented Emerson’s work in exciting ways in relation to the history and future of philosophy. In Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford 2022), Constantinesco examines the role of suffering in Emerson’s metaphysics and ethics. Elisa Tamarkin, in Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (Chicago 2022), expansively explores Emerson as a philosopher of irrelevance and relevance.

Here, Michael Jonik’s chapter “Life, Form, and Power in ‘Experience’” builds on these philosophical studies of Emerson to sketch a genealogy of the concept of power in Emerson’s writing. Power, a central leitmotif in “Experience,” Jonik argues, nonetheless becomes increasingly important to Emerson’s mature articulations of metaphysics and philosophy, nature and history, and politics and ethics in essays like “Power,” “Success,” or his lecture “Powers of the Mind.” The impulsive, circulatory, transitory, depersonalizing, and yet aggrandizing modes of power that emerge in Emerson’s thinking – the powers of the heart and the powers of the mind – find manifold articulation in his work as the creative potentialities of the imagination and the intellect, the deforming forces of love and loss, as well as the conditions that embolden individual selves to mastery, invention, and success. In turn, in her chapter “‘Allied to all’: Emerson and Ethics Beyond Self-Reliance,” Prentiss Clark investigates how Emerson’s ethical philosophy, in asking the question “How shall I live?,” is nonetheless premised on a metaphysical and ontological interconnectedness rather than on an atomized individual self. Clark explores how Emerson’s varied investments in ethics, aesthetics, religion, science, politics, or philosophy each make legible the intimacies that shape our shared existences.

William James or John Dewey have long been recognized as Emerson’s philosophical heirs, and even the radically original Charles Sanders Peirce has reluctantly admitted in his essay “The Law of the Mind” to having caught some of Emerson’s intellectual contagion:

If Peirce posits that some of Emerson’s influence entered him “unawares,” William James avidly (though never uncritically) absorbed his ideas. James reacted against Emersonian monism, idealism, or transcendentalism, that is, but he also found these positions co-present with a richly suggestive philosophy of action, power, and experience, which, geared toward the common and the present, emboldened James’s pragmatism. James translated some of Emerson’s more abstract and idealist notions into his own key notions like psychic energy, intuition, and the stream of consciousness, and Emerson’s distinctive voice finds echo in James’s rhapsodic, hortatory prose. James celebrated Emerson in his address in Concord on Emerson’s centenary, “Emerson himself was a real seer. He could perceive the full squalor of the individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration.”¹⁶

Yet while Emerson’s relationship to pragmatism is better documented than his relationship with American Hegelianism, and while his 1867 visit to the St. Louis Hegelians perhaps amounted to something of a nonencounter, more would still need to be done to fully explicate his relationship to late nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical history. As Joseph Urbas argues in his key chapter in this collection, “Writing Emerson into the History of American Philosophy” – and contrary to the influential claim by Stanley Cavell that Emerson’s place in American philosophy had been repressed – Emerson’s philosophical heirs are much more numerous and diverse than either the St. Louis Hegelians or the pragmatists. While Urbas critically resituates Emerson’s influence on Dewey, James, Peirce, Royce, or Santayana, he also carefully recovers a “multiform” legacy of American Emersonians. These include, crucially, underrepresented female philosophers and educators such as Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911), Ellen M. Mitchell (1838–1920), Susan E. Blow (1843–1916), Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930), or Ella Lyman Cabot (1866–1934), the influential African American writer and thinker W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), as well as a series of professional philosophers whose work shaped American institutional philosophy, such as Herbert W. Schneider (1892–1984), Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000), or Joseph L. Blau (1909–86).

Emerson’s transitional, transnational placement in nineteenth-century cultural and philosophical history must also emphatically include his relation to science. In his lectures, essays, and journal meditations, we often find Emerson cataloguing scientific advances: the taxonomies of Linnaeus and the French botanists; the chemistry of Priestley, Lavoisier, and Faraday; the geology of Hutton, Playfair, and Lyell; the anatomical work of Buffon, Cuvier, and St. Hilaire; the investigations into speciation of Lamarck, Agassiz, and Darwin; the astronomy of Copernicus and Laplace; and the idealist conceptions of life in German Naturphilosophie. And, again, the poet-scientist Goethe’s writings on plant morphology, osteology, or chromatics were exemplary for Emerson, as they modeled the “poetic perception of metamorphosis” (CW 8: 4). He celebrates the work of recent science in “Life and Letters in New England” as part of a reaction of the “general mind” against the “too formal science” of the eighteenth century: “there was, in the first quarter of our nineteenth century, a certain sharpness of criticism, an eagerness for reform, which showed itself in every quarter” (CW 10: 169). Natural scientists effectively rewrote geo-history, the development and durations of the physical earth, its perpetual forces, and its bloom into myriad different forms. As Michel Foucault famously details in The Order of Things, at the threshold of the nineteenth century, conventional natural history was superseded by the emergence of a new discourse in the sciences of life, the discourse of biology. Emerson, too, was positioned on this threshold of the emergence of life. Systems of ordering and classifying the world were rebuilt and set in motion (the “record is alive,” he declares in his essay on Goethe (CW 4: 151)). New attention was paid to internal organization, and processes of development began to be understood as constitutive of natural phenomena. Even the pseudo-sciences, as Emerson apologizes – Lavater’s physiognomy, Gall and Spurzheim’s phrenology, mesmerism – put science and knowledge “back in touch” with what is “human” or “genial.” Each “affirmed unity and connection between remote points,” and thus each provided “excellent criticism on the narrow and dead classification of what passed for science; and the joy with which it was greeted was an instinct of the people which no true philosopher would fail to profit by” (CW 10: 169). And Emerson undoubtedly reckoned himself one such “true philosopher.” If German metaphysics provides him the philosophical vocabulary for his most perduring questions (of how we are to understand the forms and transitions of the physical world, of how humanity can create new worlds of meaning within its intellectual, material, moral, and spiritual life), it also gave Emerson the means to appraise the philosophical value of these gains in the sciences. As he says in a “formative journal entry”¹⁷ for his “Natural History of Intellect” project: “the highest value of natural history & mainly of these new & secular results like the inferences from geology, & the discovery of parallax, & the resolution of Nebulae, is its translation into an universal cipher applicable to Man viewed as Intellect also” (JMN 10: 136).

Yet, as Mark Noble explores in his contribution to the volume, while Emerson was keenly attuned to scientific advances from his earliest writings until the end of his career, he also expressed an enduring ambivalence about the development of new scientific disciplines and empirical methods. Noble charts this ambivalence from Emerson’s early epiphany at the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in 1833 when he proclaimed, “I will be a Naturalist,” through to his later essays and lectures, wherein Emerson continues to seek the unity of the empirical sciences’ disparate modes of inquiry with philosophical intuition (viz., their “translation into an universal cipher applicable to Man viewed as Intellect also”). Similarly, Laura Dassow Walls’s chapter “Nature, Ecology, Climate: Emerson’s Ecopoetical Thought” challenges us to rethink how Emerson’s conceptions of nature (also developed across his career) both render legible the contradictions of Western ideas of “nature” and an American modernity that disallows continuities between human and natural history. While, as Walls shows, Emerson’s aesthetics seek to preserve the beauty and divinity of nature as a bulwark against modernity’s incipient forms of destruction, Emerson nonetheless recedes as our contemporary even as his work discloses the emergence of the anthropogenic forms of climate destruction that increasingly threaten planetary life.

“Adventuring on seas of thought”

All of this underscores how Emerson’s complex relationships with his American contemporaries were themselves conjugated through the transnational movements in which he participated and which took place across the long durée of his intellectual life. Yet no matter where we find this transnational, transitional Emerson, he is admittedly never far from his Concord milieu, which he both profoundly affected and which profoundly affected him. As Hawthorne recalls in his “The Old Manse,” and not without a touch of sarcasm, during his time living in Concord, “it was impossible to dwell in his vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought, which, in the brains of some people, wrought a singular giddiness, – new truth being as heady as new wine.” Yet while Hawthorne “admired Emerson as a poet, of deep beauty and austere tenderness,” he concluded that he “sought nothing from him as a philosopher.”¹⁸ Henry David Thoreau’s practical ecological philosophy developed in close but agonistic relation with Emerson’s idealist conception of nature, and both of their later works explore the challenges to this conception posed by the emerging empirical sciences and materialism. Emerson, in his eulogy of Thoreau, cites his younger friend’s “broken task” (CW 10: 431) but recognizes him as one who cultivated himself and strove, a latter-day Stoic or “Yankee Diogenes,” to live fully, freely, and deliberately: “He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well. If he slighted and defied the opinions of others, it was only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief” (CW 10: 414). When Emerson edited – if selectively – an early edition of Thoreau’s correspondence (published in 1865 as Thoreau’s Letters to Various Persons), he labeled it approvingly as a “perfect piece of Stoicism.”¹⁹

Hawthorne and Thoreau were just a few of Emerson’s neighbors in whom he found interlocutors, and indeed much has been said about his relation to A. Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, Jones Very, Frederic Henry Hedge, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and many others. But Emerson’s work was fundamentally shaped by the diverse contributions of independent-minded female writers and intellectuals in his close circle: especially Margaret Fuller and his aunt and spiritual and intellectual advisor Mary Moody Emerson, but also myriad others such as Sophia Ripley, Elizabeth Hoar, Elizabeth Peabody, Caroline Sturgis, Louisa May Alcott, his wife Lidian Emerson, and, as we have seen, his daughter Ellen Emerson. Fuller, in particular, had a profound effect on Emerson’s writing and thinking, and their intellectual and personal relationship was intense and mutually provocative. As Fuller puts it in a private letter to Emerson: “We are to be much to one another. How often have I left you despairing and forlorn. How often have I said, this light will never understand my fire; this clear eye will never discern the law by which I am filling my circle; this simple force will never interpret my need to manifold being.” Or, as Emerson writes in an October 12, 1841 journal entry:

The relationship of these close friends and “beautiful foes”²⁰ eventually cooled, and Fuller left for New York and then for Europe. But it had yielded intense statements of proximity and division, marking the affective and intellectual itineraries of both of them. Following Fuller’s untimely death in an 1850 shipwreck off Fire Island while returning from Italy, Emerson coauthored (with William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke) the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), a work in which Emerson again selectively and complexly curated one of his friend’s legacies.²¹ Not only did he (with his co-authors) modify some of Fuller’s passages, but in so doing, he both tenderly memorialized her and dispassionately minimized her singular expressions of feminist power, intellect, and desire, accusing her of “sentimentalism.”²²

Since the publication of the previous Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the lives and works of Emerson’s female contemporaries like Margaret Fuller and Mary Moody Emerson have been extensively reexamined. Thanks to Phyllis Cole’s seminal Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (Oxford 2002), as well as more recent interventions by Meg McGavran Murray, Christopher Hanlon, Noelle A. Baker, Maria Popova, Alice de Galzain, and David M. Robinson,²³ we now have a much clearer understanding of Emerson’s attitudes toward the women of his mid nineteenth-century intellectual milieu and their own unique contributions to its creative ferment. Their work has also emphasized Emerson’s inconsistent support for the women’s rights movement. On the one hand, Emerson, in his 1855 “Address at the Women’s Rights Convention,” remarked that “the times are marked by the new attitude of woman, urging by argument and by association, her rights of all kinds, in short, to one half of the world: the right to education; to avenues of employment; to equal rights of property; to equal rights in marriage; to the exercise of the professions; to suffrage” (SL 221). Yet on the other hand, Emerson had rejected three invitations to support the movement before this address (viz., in 1850 by Paulina Wright Davis to attend the Woman’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts; in 1851 by Lucy Stone to attend another convention in Worcester; and in 1853 by Wendell Phillips to use Emerson’s name on a printed circular designed to secure signers for a petition to be laid before the constitutional convention). Even as he lent his support to women’s rights activism, he still often relied on traditional representations of femininity and restricted his list of exemplary individuals to representative men, thus leading Leslie Elizabeth Eckel to label Emerson a “reluctant feminist.”²⁴

Emerson’s hesitant advocacy for women’s rights can be productively put into relation with his other reform and political work, including his antislavery writings and his attitudes toward race, his all-too-brief resistance to Indigenous American removal and genocide, and more generally, his understanding of democracy.²⁵ Here, in Chapter 8, “Labor, Slavery, and the Civil War,” Sophia Forster returns to the question of the relation between Emerson’s transcendentalism and his participation in the abolition movement but invites us to do so in the context of his varied and often paradoxical perspectives on social reform, labor, law, racial difference, and violence. In Chapter 9, Johannes Voelz, in turn, explicates how Emerson’s multidimensional notion of democracy – conceived as a “way of life” – traverses official, state, or legal power relations and, crucially, has us rethink questions of individual and mass, equality and justice, abolitionism and the Civil War. David LaRocca’s chapter focuses on Emerson’s 1856 book English Traits to argue how Emerson’s use of the term “race” relates to his concept of “nationality.” Like Baker, LaRocca investigates Emerson’s transatlantic relations. He argues, in contrast to less generous critics, that Emerson is indeed egalitarian, that his philosophy of the fluidity of identity brings him to a stance against definite identity distinctions, and that English Traits does not praise Saxon whiteness but poetico-sociologically investigates the nation of England.

Another recurrent theme in this New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson is Emerson’s remarkable influence in poetics and aesthetics, as felt in literary circles radiating outward from Concord to London, Paris, Rome, and beyond, and across the nearly 150 years since his death in 1882. While in intimate, complex conversation with Thoreau and Fuller, he was also in dialogue with many of the important literary and cultural figures of his time. Walt Whitman’s sprawling accretive poetry answered Emerson’s call in his essay “The Poet” to versify America’s dazzling geography (see CW 3: 22). Upon receiving Emerson’s approbation for the 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass, Whitman advantageously hitched his wagon to Emerson’s star to help him gain national poetic notoriety. Emily Dickinson, who did not know Emerson directly, nonetheless drew from a thematically similar cultural, theological, and aesthetic canvas as did he, and her verse is in complicated and elliptical dialogue with his writing. If Hawthorne was less sanguine in their reactions to Emerson, Herman Melville celebrated Emerson as a deep “thought-diver” into the human condition; he nonetheless declared that he does not “oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow,”²⁶ and caricatured Emerson’s transcendentalism as ironically business-minded in the character of Mark Winsome in The Confidence-Man (1857). Edgar Allan Poe was outright hostile toward Emerson and his “Frogpondians,” suggesting, infamously, that the editor of The Dial – Emerson, not Fuller – should be hanged. In his “Exordium to Critical Notices,” Poe lambasted “Orphicism, or Dialism, or Emersonism, or any other pregnant compound indicative of confusion worse confounded.”²⁷

But while Emerson’s expansive influence on American poetics is undeniable, the reputation of his own poetry, including his major books of original verse, his anthology of selected verse Parnassus (1875), and his translations of Persian poetry, has fared less well. Yet in her chapter “‘Numbers Wild’: Emerson’s Poetry and Metaphysics,” Danielle Follett defends Emerson’s poetry from accusations that it is conventional or secondary, impenetrable or awkward. Rather, for Follett, Emerson’s idiosyncratic poetic style, rhetoric, and prosody were thoughtfully wrought and consciously strained the conventions of meter and lyric form in a way that prefigures modernist innovation. Perhaps most crucial for Follett, however, is how Emerson’s poetics were deeply embedded within his aesthetics and metaphysics, especially insofar as they sought a delicate balance of nature’s symmetries and asymmetries, its consonances and dissonances, its regularities and irregularities – in short, as Follett borrows a phrase from Emerson’s 1867 poem “May-Day,” its “numbers wild” (CW 9: 327).

Similarly, Nicholas L. Guardiano emphasizes how Emerson’s aesthetics, pervasive in his writing, stand in essential relation to his philosophy and are manifest in topics like perception, sensation, experience, creativity, and, especially, beauty. Placing Emerson’s “metaphysically informed” aesthetics in a rich tradition from Plato and the Neoplatonists to Hume and Goethe and Dewey and Peirce, Guardiano compellingly explicates how beauty serves as an Emersonian ideal of human thought and action and compels us to know, to believe, to grow, and to create. On this basis, Guardiano claims one of Emerson’s “most valuable (and under-appreciated) contributions to aesthetics” is in how he shows that “art shares in the inter-informing, polyphonic growth of a universe of signs.”

Follett, Guardiano, and Meehan, respectively, in suggesting Emerson’s poetic figurations as anticipating modernism, in placing Emerson’s aesthetic figurations in relation to pragmatism, and in engaging the rhetorical figurations in Emerson’s late styles, posit a transitional Emerson whose voice resounds beyond the limits of his own time. Whitman celebrates Emerson in Specimen Days “for his sweet, vital-tasting melody, rhymed philosophy, and poems as amber-clear as the honey of the wild bee he loves to sing”²⁸; and, Henry James claims, like his brother William, an inherited eloquence from Emerson. But Emerson’s voice undeniably inflects the writing of a multitude of authors, notably Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ralph Waldo Ellison, Pauline Hopkins, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Ashbery. Paul Grimstad, in his chapter “Emersonian Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century,” likewise suggests Emerson’s importance for subsequent artistic, literary, and musical experimentation and his role as a transitional figure from Romanticism to the modern and the contemporary periods. Whether in terms of the experimental writing of Marcel Proust, Ralph Ellison, or John Ashbery, or in the experimental music of Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, and Elliot Carter, Grimstad prompts us to find an Emersonian “self-reliant” art – an art emboldened to new independences, an art opened to complexities of movement and form, and an art that skates, surprises, dazzles, and swings.

Despite his deep resonances in the work of so many who have followed him, Emerson has often been taken to be aloof or distant. This is the case in Sarah Orne Jewett’s short poetic recollection “A Sonnet on Meeting Ralph Waldo Emerson”: “I met great Emerson, serene, remote, / Like one adventuring on seas of thought.”²⁹ Similarly, Jorge Luis Borges, himself far away in Buenos Aires, paints an imaginative poetic portrait of a withdrawn Emerson:

Yet Emerson’s readers – a vast and varied, multicultural and multiracial, national and global community – do not testify to such a serene remoteness or to a fame that longs to be someone else. Rather, they speak to an Emerson whose words and phrases, ideas and intuitions, modes of seeing and modes of living – the essential books he has read and the ineffaceable books he’s written – have shaped our collective cultural life.

“to draw a new circle”

While Emerson’s place in American literary history has remained secure, the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson draws on a wealth of recent Emerson scholarship which has highlighted his contemporary relevance for questions of philosophy and politics, ecology and science, poetics and aesthetics, or identity and race, and connects these to the key formal and interpretive issues at stake in understanding his work. The volume’s contributors engage the full breadth of Emerson’s work, developing novel approaches to canonical works like Nature and the essays “Self-Reliance” and “Experience,” or to his poetry and journals, and bringing critical attention to his lectures and to the long-overlooked texts of his later period. They range from explorations of Emerson’s relationship to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development and legacy; European and British Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; life, power, and form; political resistance and slavery; the “progress” of culture, US imperialism, and Sino-American relations; aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and their expansive legacies in American culture, thought, and education. They bear witness to both Emerson’s broad eclecticism and the many channels of influence and confluence that form the currents of his work, as well as its concussive and sometimes contradictory dissonances. The chapters in this New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson thus both register the new Emersons that have emerged in the past decades and also point to new Emersons to come. They ask again the question of how are we to read him now and how might we continue to read him anew. They seek to draw another circle in Emerson’s reception or prompt a movement outward into new futures for Emerson’s work to take purchase.

At the end of his letter to Henry James Sr. regarding his visit to the St. Louis Hegelians, Emerson adds a note of gratitude, not for him but for his son, the young novelist Henry Jr.: “Thank your boy Harry from me for his good stories. I prize all your boys, and Alice, & send sympathetic regards to Mrs James. Yours ever, R.W. Emerson” (L 5: 514). In his 1888 Partial Portraits, Henry James Jr., in turn, expresses his gratitude to Emerson, putting him first among his sketches of influential writers. James contends that Emerson will assuredly remain enduring, “that he serves and will not wear out, and that indeed we cannot afford to drop him.” This is because, as James summarizes:

At the end of this passage, James adds a quotation from Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”: “O my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not yet drawn.” This New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson bears witness to this complex and multifarious Emerson, to this Emerson who has lived in thousands of minds, to this Emerson of singular power, to this Emerson of his time, of our time, and of times yet to come. It seeks to draw a new circle and to find in Emerson ever new resources on which we have not yet drawn.