The interplay of life, form, and power is central to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay, “Experience.” It also comes to mark his 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.” Power is a key theme across Emerson’s relentlessly eclectic thinking – from the creative potentialities of the imagination and the intellect, and the deforming forces of love and loss, to the conditions that embolden individual selves to mastery, invention, and success. 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 – point to a vitality that not only appears as the content of his essays and lectures but is at once stylistically performed by them.

This chapter examines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seemingly contradictory relation to European Romanticism. Focusing on the concepts of genius, idealism, and originality in key works (Nature, English Traits, and Representative Men), it argues that Emerson’s admiration for English and German Romantic writings was not at odds with his call for cultural independence. Because Emerson understood the genius to be a teacher who empowers his students to reject him, he could imagine any reliance on Coleridge, Wordsworth, or Carlyle as ultimately enabling independence. The philosophical idealism essential to Emerson’s call for cultural independence, moreover, was a mode of perception that defied national categorization and so did not threaten the distinctive American culture he hoped to inaugurate. In his later writings, Emerson also came to clarify a concept of originality that involved the adaptation of inherited forms rather than the invention of new ones. Because borrowing became a precondition for innovation, intellectual debts did not undermine autonomy.

Emerson’s thought, from his early essay Nature to his late lectures on atomic physics, reveals the contradictory complexities of the Western concept of “nature,” which indexes both the outer world external to the human self, or “soul,” and the essence of our own human “nature.” Emerson’s thought thus reveals the deeper drama of American modernity, which refuses continuities between human and natural history to protect the divinity of the all-empowering human mind from its embedding in social and ecological relations. Emerson’s salvation lies in the realm of aesthetics, which responded to modernity’s iconoclastic destruction of nature by resurrecting the beauty of nature in art, reanimating in a quarantined zone all that modernity destroys. Today, when “nature” – now including anthropogenic climate change – no longer reassures us of our divinity but precipitates an existential crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to read Emerson as our contemporary, even as his work discloses the sources of our predicament.

After sketching two indicative moments from Emerson’s 1867 westward lecturing trip – his visit to the Santee Sioux in Minnesota and his visit to a group of Hegelian philosophers in St. Louis – this Introduction to the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson gives an overview of the volume contributors’ main thematic emphases. These are Emerson in relation to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development; transatlantic Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; political resistance and slavery; race, US imperialism, and Asia; aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and experimentalism; and his late style and legacy. While many readers of Emerson are most familiar with the iconic picture of him as the Sage of Concord, this introduction paints a picture of a transitional and transnational Emerson who tirelessly lectured across the United States throughout his lifetime, who can be placed in his contemporaneous transatlantic currents of Romantic literature, religion, philosophy, or science, and who nonetheless looks forward to modernist poetic, aesthetic, or musical innovations.

This chapter argues that to truly understand Emerson, we need to see and hear him at the lectern. It sketches Emerson’s place within the performance culture and popular lecture circuit of antebellum America and contends that we should regard his works as a form of “voiced essay.” The chapter brings to life Emerson’s dramatic, modulated style as a performer of his own work, showing how his writing simulates these spoken elements at the levels of both style and theme, and inviting readers to become active listeners. The “voiced essay” ultimately dissolves strict boundaries between orality and writing, energizing a new form of social engagement. By encouraging readers to hear Emerson as a figure with a strikingly modern grasp of media forms and the synergy between orality and textuality, the chapter underscores Emerson’s ongoing relevance to debates about performance, intellectual virality, authority, and the transmission of ideas.

When discussing Asian religion, art, and philosophy, Emerson generally bestows praise and tends toward cosmopolitan, universalist sentiments. Old Asian ideas, especially from Persian, Indian, and Chinese traditions, reinforced his Transcendentalist sense of morality and, especially, his belief in “the infinitude of the private man.” In the contexts of geography and history, however, he gravitates toward nationalist, imperialist, and racist views. Here he betrays his vulnerability to some of the ruling ideas of geographical determinism and teleological historicism informing the ideology of manifest destiny. Yet, true to form for a writer who so famously abjured consistency, this basic distinction does not always hold. This chapter thus begins with an examination of Emerson’s discrepant Asias before analyzing how, despite this general dichotomy, he was sometimes able to subvert prevailing tendencies and introduce uncommon subtleties to his representation of Asia, its cultures, and its peoples.

David LaRocca’s chapter resituates Emerson’s 1856 book English Traits within Emerson’s transatlanticism, as well as within his intellectual, cultural, and historical moment. In particular, it analyzes and contextualizes Emerson’s comments on race in English Traits in relation to the formation of British and American national mythologies. As LaRocca argues, in contrast to less generous critics, Emerson is indeed egalitarian, his philosophy of the fluidity of identity brings him to a stance against definite identity distinctions, and English Traits does not praise Saxon whiteness but poetico-sociologically investigates the nation of England. What is more, Emerson’s interest was, in part, personal. He made English Traits a public statement that justified questions about his family tree and, in a larger domain, the way that New England was formed and informed by England, even while he pursued a broader view of human history – of whatever vintage – as inseparable from natural history.

This chapter explores how Emerson’s essays are tantamount to a new kind of distinctively American art. It suggests Emerson’s importance for subsequent artistic, literary, and musical experimentation and his role as a transitional figure from Romanticism to the modern and contemporary periods. Whether in 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, it prompts us to find an Emersonian “self-reliant” art – an art that tests out new independences, opens to complexities of movement and form, and an art that skates, surprises, atomizes, and swings.

This chapter examines a lesser-studied element of Wallace’s intertextual engagement: his engagements with poets, poetry and poetics. Although he once claimed that he was “not talented enough” to be a poet, Wallace’s writing was deeply immersed in and often concerned with questions to do with the nature of poetry and the figure of the poet. Some of his titles refer or allude to specific poems – from “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (George Berkeley) to The Pale King (John Keats) – while other texts, such as the short story “Here and There,” use the idea of poetry to explore the relationship between language and experience, expression and form. In his longer works, too, Wallace uses particular poets in interesting (often entertaining) ways – W. H. Auden in The Broom of the System, for example, and Emily Dickinson in Infinite Jest. In interviews and essays, Wallace declared an interest in a wide range of poets, from W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore and Philip Larkin to Bill Knott and Stephen Dobyn. Taken together, these and further examples suggest that a more detailed account of Wallace’s writing on and about poetry will fill a particular gap in the understandings of his work.

Given that “Nature” is historically imbricated in the history of Christianity, the secularizing movement of modernity puts nature under intense pressure. The resulting conflicts are modeled by the United States, which authorized political revolution by invoking “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The American Transcendentalists extended nature as divine order and transcendent arbiter to authorize intellectual revolution, consolidating liberal Protestantism, European Romanticism, and modern science into a template for the meaning of nature in modernity; humans became not humble creatures in God’s creation but God’s avatars commanding all merely material beings. Today, as the resulting ecological collapse destabilizes inherited concepts of nature, “ecology” is offered as a replacement, even though ecology as a science cannot offer moral value or spiritual meaning. This intellectual history is traced through the founding work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who offered idealism as the engine of modernity, and three followers, Orestes Brownson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, who variously pluralized nature into the plenitude of material forms and beings seen as vulnerable incarnations of a higher or divine life force, prefiguring the science and ethics of ecology as an aspect of, rather than replacement for, nature.

This essay focuses on “Music Decomposed” and, to a lesser extent, “A Matter of Meaning It” (they are companion pieces), contextualizing these texts, and exploring some important parallels between musical composition and philosophical authorship. Colapietro shows how, in subtle and surprising ways, some of the main themes of Cavell’s philosophical investigations are articulated in “Music Decomposed” (themes such as voice, timing, extemporaneity, contingency, deep listening, rule-following, and an uncompromising affirmation of the radical nature of human responsibility made in the teeth of one or another fashionable celebration of impersonal mechanism). Tradition and technique are necessary for creativity, even if creativity reconfigures tradition and transcends technique.

Commenting on the findings of the previous two chapters on Emerson’s and Whitman’s reflections on photographic immediacy, this chapter stresses the social, political, and media cultural context of their work. It argues that Emerson’s and Whitman’s romantic quest for immediacy was not an escapist endeavor that aimed to keep literature aloof from larger social and technological transformations. Instead, both writers creatively responded to the reshaping of American society under the pressures of budding industrialization and halting democratization processes by developing a poetics that sought to connect literary and social practices. Emerson’s and Whitman’s poetics of immediacy ground literary communication in the lived experience of writers and readers, make literature relevant to the concerns of everyday life (including social and sexual relations, spirituality, work, and politics), and seek to strengthen their readers’ active participation in the world.

This chapter return to the soteriological arc with a discussion of sacramental imagery and aspirations of redemption and transcendence. Beginning with the Gaudete Epilogue poems and moving on River and Under the North Star, it looks at the rise in sacramental and specifically eucharistic imagery in Hughes’s poetry, arguing that the naturalization of sacramental activity in these poems authenticates human religious concerns. Sympathies between Hughes’s work and that of the American Transcendentalist, hinted at here there so far in the book, are discussed explicitly. Also making significant reference to Eliot, this chapter discusses the question of time in Hughes’s poetry, where, especially in River, it appears as something to be resisted and potentially escaped or transcended. The chapter culminates in a close reading of the poems “That Morning” and “The River.” We watch as Hughes overcomes anxieties about the destructive nature of time by cleaving ever closer to an explicitly Christian metaphysic.