Emerson, Thoreau, and the Poetics of Ineffability

‘Language is the great study of man’ declared Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Journal of 1826. His bold statement is not altogether uncharacteristic of the Romantic movement as a whole; European Romanticism, along with its American Transcendentalist counterpart, displayed an uncommon preoccupation with language, specifically its origins and limits. As Romantic poets and philosophers explored the sublime extremities of human experience (which Michael O’Neill has called ‘the other side of sense-experience’), the chief problem facing writers was how to effectively communicate these intensely subjective states of consciousness.1 Writers thus began to investigate the increasingly unstable relationships between mind and matter, language and thought, and, most importantly, the self and the natural world. The ability to express oneself in language became increasingly fraught with anxiety, and the ‘essence’ of Romantic ‘agony’ came to be defined, paradoxically, as ‘that which cannot be described’.2 To allay such anxieties, Romantic authors resorted to more indirect, poetic means of expression – ‘myths’ and ‘symbols’ – in order to escape from the ‘rational’ constraints of objective prose.3 Writers hoped to embody something of the ‘dark […] irrational […] [and] inexpressible’ secrets of nature ignored by the preceding Age of Reason.4 To demand that writers restrict themselves to the strict rules of grammar, syntax, and diction was, in effect, an unthinkable capitulation to an oppressive philosophy of conformity and unhealthy restraint.

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Words, denounced by Emerson as merely ‘finite organs of the infinite mind’, were uneasily employed as an inadequate substitute for ‘something which is in itself wordless’.5 Working in this imperfect medium, Romantic writers (especially poets) found they could only give a partial account of their transcendental vision of reality, producing poetic fragments of a larger whole (for example Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel and William Wordsworth’s ‘Nutting’).6 English Romantic poets explicitly acknowledged the limits of their chosen medium; Wordsworth lamented ‘the sad incompetence of human speech’ which failed to convey ‘a sense sublime | Of something far more deeply interfused’, whereas Percy Bysshe Shelley could only gesture towards ‘some unseen Power’ which ‘words cannot express’.7 Similarly, German Idealist philosophers such as Immanuel Kant acknowledged that ‘[d]espite the great wealth of our languages, the thinker often finds himself at a loss for the expression which exactly fits his concept’, thus rendering them ‘unable to be really intelligible to others or even to himself’.8 Thus, a tension between the self’s privately inscrutable experience, and the wider public’s demand for ‘intelligibil[ity]’, was established.9

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines “ineffable” as that which ‘transcend[s] expression’ or ‘cannot be expressed or described in language’ (OED, adj., a.1), deriving from the Middle French word ineffable, and originating from the Latin ineffabilis (in meaning “not”, effor meaning “utter”, and bilis meaning “-able”). Such etymological excavations of the earliest meanings of words were frequently undertaken by both Emerson and his younger protégé, Henry David Thoreau, in an attempt to re-establish the primal connections between humankind, God, and the natural world. The inheritance of Romantic philosophies of language from their European contemporaries, as well as advancements in etymology and philology from fellow American scholars, proved crucial. Emerson and Thoreau became passionately engaged with the task of manipulating language in order to give an adequately symbolic expression of the self, an unexplored natural landscape, and a radically new conception of the divine. Since words, according to both thinkers, found their origins as ‘signs of natural facts’ (CW, I:17), a rediscovery of their natural etymological roots could renew humankind’s spiritual perception of nature. Yet, as their fellow Transcendentalist Elizabeth Palmer Peabody saw, humans had ‘lost the key to language’, the ‘great instrument’ by which the ‘finite mind’ could elevate itself to the infinite.10 The words used by people today were ‘no longer symbols but counters’, and thus failed to ‘coincide with the eternal logos’ of the divine.11 Of what significance were Romantic intimations of God, nature, and the sublime if one could not adequate relate their experience to others?12

Whereas European Romantic authors were able to frame their literary and philosophical endeavours in opposition to a previously well-established tradition, American writers in the early nineteenth century were unable to look to their country’s past for a substantial literary heritage. As part of the larger literary and philosophical movement of Transcendentalism, Emerson and Thoreau were understandably anxious to forge a distinctively American poetics (following their country’s recent independence from England), further contributing to their fraught relationship with a language inherited from the past.13 As part of this project, the idealised role of the Poet was central. Both Emerson and Thoreau imagined that this quasi-divine Bardic figure – the “Orpheus of Concord” – would re-establish the Edenic connection between language and the natural landscape by tracing their words to the natural world they inhabited. This would liberate a whole generation of thinkers to contribute to the new “Song” of America; indeed, Emerson’s ideal of “The Poet” would later be fulfilled by both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. On the other hand, Thoreau’s ideal of the “Poet-naturalist”, in their ability to reconnect humankind with the natural world through combining the empiricism of the scientist and the idealism of the poet, would provide the groundwork for modern ecocriticism’s search for an adequate representation of nature in language. Yet, for all of their grand theorising, neither Emerson nor Thoreau could embody their poetic ideals in their verse. Instead, they found their true medium of expression in prose (for Emerson, his essays, and Thoreau, his journal) which enabled them to more fully communicate ‘the ineffable mysteries of the intellect’ (CW, VI:163), those mystical states of consciousness where the self comes into momentary contact with the divine through nature.

Scholars, following Mark Van Doren, have tended to distinguish Thoreau as a ‘specific Emerson’; that is, more materialistic in his philosophical outlook compared to his idealistic counterpart.14 While I do not wish to dispute this general claim, I do believe that this contrast is often unnecessarily exaggerated to deify Thoreau as the ‘patron saint of American environmental writing’, whereas the underlying influence of Emerson’s more theoretical (albeit abstract) groundwork, is neglected.15 Their common preoccupations with the “poetics of ineffability”, and with the limits of describing nature and the self, remain a key unifying element in their thought and deserves further critical attention. Indeed, both Emerson and Thoreau’s linguistic explorations have had lasting effects on American culture and continue to resonate potently today, finding afterlives in fields as diverse as nature writing, continental philosophy (most notably in Friedrich Nietzsche’s reading of Emerson), and American poetics more generally.

Part I: Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Emerson in Theory

In his satirical allegory ‘The Celestial Railroad’, Nathaniel Hawthorne presents the figure of the ‘Giant Transcendentalist’ as frustratingly indefinable: ‘neither he […] nor anybody for him, has ever been able to describe [him]’, and he speaks in ‘so strange a phraseology, that [nobody] knew […] what he meant’.16 Whilst not explicitly alluding to Ralph Waldo Emerson, this description can largely be read as an indictment of the founding father of American Transcendentalism for his elusive and obscure method of communication. Modern scholars and writers continue to denounce Emerson’s writings for their lack of clarity and structure, however, Emerson’s complex philosophy of language forces him to accept that a clear elucidation of ineffable truths is impossible.17 Instead, ‘[t]he aim of the author is not to tell the truth – that he cannot do’, but rather, ‘to suggest it […] through ‘many words, hoping that one […] will bring [the reader] as near to the fact as he is’ (JMN, V:51, emphasis mine). Thus, Emerson must adopt a prose style structured around various modes of indirect suggestions and associations, employing the language of symbols, tropes, and analogies to elicit a quasi-religious conversion in the reader, forcing them to think for themselves while also appreciating the inadequacies of language as a medium of thought.

Emerson’s philosophy, though often highly unsystematic, may rightly be termed a philosophy of “process”; that is, a system of thought which consistently emphasises the universe as ‘fluid […] volatile’, and devoid of ‘fixtures’ (CW, II:179), in contrast to all forms of ‘Custom’, which instead ‘represents every thing as immovably fixed’.18 For Emerson, ‘[n]othing is secure but life, transition, the energising spirit’ (CW, II:189), and thus ‘[t]he only sin is limitation’ (CW,II:182).19 Theologically speaking, these a priori assumptions forces Emerson to condemn the ‘stationariness’ of institutionalised Christianity, which assumes that ‘the age of inspiration is past’ and ‘the Bible is closed’ (CW, I:89), in favour of a more dynamic, immediate, and personal connection with the divine. In his highly controversial ‘Divinity School Address’, Emerson tasked himself with demonstrating that ‘God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake’ (CW, I:89), and ‘dare[d] [listeners] to love God without mediator or veil’ (CW, I:90).20 Culturally, Emerson’s fear of custom and imitation led him to formulate his (in)famous doctrine of “Self-Reliance”. In this ‘retrospective’ age (CW, I:7), Emerson saw that the spectre of English society and institutions loomed oppressively large in the American imagination, producing ‘timid and apologetic’ men, who ‘[dare] not say “I think,” […] but [instead] quotes some saint or sage’ (CW, II:38), passively yielding to the ‘courtly muses of Europe’ (CW, I:69). In his lecture ‘The American Scholar’, a speech that has been termed America’s ‘intellectual Declaration of Independence’, Emerson posits the self-reliant ideal of ‘Man Thinking’ (CW, I:53), confidently asserting ‘[w]e will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds’ (CW, I:70).21 Yet, how may a new generation of American writers ‘produce new works’ when the majority merely ‘admire old [European] ones’ and ‘chew the cud of thought in the shade’ (JMN, II:208)? Emerson’s intellectual undertaking was ambitious; he demanded nothing less than ‘an original relation to the universe’, and for a ‘poetry […] philosophy [and religion] of insight’ rather than of ‘tradition’ (CW, I:7). Already, one can see how a preoccupation with language itself will be crucial in formulating a radically new American culture.

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Emerson’s Philosophy of Language

After conceding that the concept of language itself could be ‘not only unexplained but inexplicable’ (CW, I:8), Emerson outlines three key propositions on the nature of language in his Transcendentalist manifesto Nature:

1. Words are signs of natural facts.

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit (CW, I:17).

Central to Emerson’s argument, as the first proposition makes clear, is the notion that ‘[e]very word […] if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance’ (CW, I:18, emphasis mine). Emerson provides numerous examples to support this claim: ‘Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind […] We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought’ (CW, I:18). Following this ‘radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts’, Emerson imagines a primordial time in which ‘language [is] more picturesque’, and ‘savages’, due to their intimate connection with the natural world, ‘converse [only] in figures’ (CW, I:19). Emerson here alludes to a linguistic theory defined by Hans Aarsleff as ‘Adamic Language’, which saw all ‘languages [as descended from] the original perfect language created by Adam when he named the animals in his prelapsarian state’.22 Emerson also draws upon John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in its exploration of the ‘dependence our words have on common sensible ideas’; however, Emerson rejects Locke’s notion of words acting as abstract signifiers, merely ‘annexed’ arbitrarily to ideas with no relation to reality.23 Instead, Emerson connects words directly to their ‘material appearance’ (CW, I:18) in nature, thus suggesting a non-arbitrary connection between words and reality. Thus, as James Perrin Warren has argued, Emerson ‘uses Locke to add depth and balance to the Adamic language theory’.24 A closer examination of their hypothetical origins of the word ‘Spirit’ (from the Latin spiritus, meaning either “breath” or “wind”) reveals how their theories depart. Whereas for Locke, ‘Spirit’ means, ‘in its primary signification […] Breath’, for Emerson, the same word means ‘wind’ (CW, I:18).25 Emerson’s alteration thus ‘emphasizes the [external] role of nature’ and ‘sensible things’ (CW, I:18, emphasis mine), whereas Locke’s original etymology emphasises the ‘human, bodily aspect’ by ‘internalizing the connection […] to that of word and idea’.26

Emerson’s second and third propositions fail to complete the expected syllogism (which should presumably conclude with the statement: “Particular words are symbols of particular spiritual facts”), thereby establishing a more universal correspondence between nature and the spirit. This theory, derived in large part from the theories of Emanuel Swedenborg (along with other Christian Mystics such as Jacob Boehme and previous Neoplatonists), posits a mystical correspondence between the material and the spiritual realm, and a “Language of Nature” which can be interpreted symbolically.27 In early lectures, Emerson explicitly alludes to ‘Nature [as] a language’ and expresses a desire to ‘learn’ this ‘significant and universal’ (EL, I:26) tongue. Thus, since we ‘inhabit’ a world full of ‘symbols’ (CW, III:12), language must necessarily be metaphoric to correspond meaningfully between nature and the spirit.28 However, as we have seen, Emerson feared that his contemporaries were ‘feed[ing] unconsciously’ on the ‘primary writers of the country’(CW, I:20). Modern American writers, living in cities detached from nature, had become ‘corrupt[ed]’ by ‘secondary desires’ (including ‘the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and […] praise’ (CW, I:20)), causing language also to become ‘corrupt[ed]’ and ‘rotten’ (CW, I:19). By failing to ‘connect […] thought with its proper symbol’ (CW, I:20), humankind had lost its primal connection with the natural world.

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Throughout his works, Emerson consistently presents words and language as an imperfect medium through which to communicate the truths of nature and the spirit. This stems partly from Emerson’s dichotomy between the fluxional nature of reality, and the static, fixed nature of language. The concept of ‘Truth’, for example, is ‘as bad to catch as light’, and will not be ‘translate[d], collate[d], [or] distille[d]’ (CW, I:108) into words, which merely ‘break, chop, and impoverish’ (CW, I:28). When dealing with such abstract ideas, Emerson believes that mere ‘[s]tatements of the infinite are usually felt to be unjust’ (CW, I:124). Moreover, any attempts to ‘analyse’ the ‘method of nature’ (CW, I:124) will necessarily be doomed to failure, since ‘Nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory and impulsive’ (CW, III:39), meaning ‘[w]e cannot bandy words with [her]’ (CW, III:112). The writer must, therefore, humbly admit this ‘intrinsic defect in the organ’ of language (CW, I:124), resigning himself to the fact that every ‘sentence must also contain its own apology for being spoken’ (CW, II:89). Language also poses a more fundamental threat to the self-reliant individual. Emerson concedes that ‘Nature will be reported’ (CW, IV:151) and that ‘[a]ll men […] stand in need of expression’ (CW, III:4); yet, how can one express oneself or nature authentically in the imperfect medium of language, which so often ‘thinks for us?’ (EL, I:229, emphasis mine). To resolve this, Emerson imagines the salvific role of the “Poet-prophet”, whose ‘love of truth’ will enable them to renew language and ‘fasten words again to visible things’ (CW, I:20), thereby re-establishing humankind’s Edenic connection with language and the natural world.

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The Role of The Poet

Given Emerson’s attempts to formulate a uniquely American system of thought, it is surprising how often his philosophical ideas are derived from largely European sources.29 From Coleridge (and German Idealism more widely), Emerson derived the epistemological distinction between “Reason/Imagination” and the “Understanding/Fancy”, and the notion of a monistic unity underlying all physical appearances.30 The faculty of “Reason”, in its ability to apprehend the spiritual truths of nature, was closely allied to the poetic ‘secondary Imagination’, which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate’ and seeks to ‘idealize and unify’.31 Coleridge contrasts this secondary Imagination with the ‘Fancy’, which deals only in ‘fixities and definites’.32 As outlined by Frank Lentricchia, Coleridge establishes a dichotomy between Wordsworth’s idealised rustic poet, who is a ‘prisoner […] of an empiricist psychology’, limited to ‘insulated [and dead] facts’, and the ‘wise […] poet’ of the secondary imagination, whose visionary mode of perception allows them to use facts creatively, revealing the ‘connections of [all] things’.­33 For Emerson, the majority of humankind possess only the Fancy. In Nature, he admits that ‘few adult persons can see nature’ properly, since most have a ‘very superficial’ (CW, I:9) mode of perception, that is, seeing only through the faculty of the “Understanding”. Since humans are ‘disunited with [themselves], their ‘axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things’, meaning they can only see a ‘ruin or […] blank’ in place of the ‘original and eternal beauty’ (CW, I:43) of nature. Only the “Poet-prophet”, the true ‘lover of nature […] whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other’ (CW, I:9), can re-establish the spiritual unity hidden to most of society.34

In her book Transatlantic Transcendentalism, Samantha C. Harvey posits the notion of the ‘Romantic triad’, consisting of ‘nature, spirit, and humanity’, to highlight the affinities between Emerson and Coleridge’s conception of the “Poet-prophet’s” role.35 The triad can be visualised thus:

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According to this theory, the “Poet-prophet” occupies the central role by reconciling ‘the spiritual and natural’ through a transcendental, visionary insight, then ‘communicat[ing] [these] visions to the rest of humanity’.36 The first step in this process is a recognition of the complex interrelation between the natural and spiritual realms, mediated through the use of the symbolic method. Here, Emerson usefully distinguishes between the hermeneutic approaches of the ‘poet’ and the ‘mystic’ (CW, III:20). Whereas the mystic (here Emerson has Swedenborg chiefly in mind), ‘nails a symbol to [only] one sense’ (CW, III:20), for example, ‘a horse signif[ying] carnal understanding; a tree […] perception’ (CW, IV:68), mistaking ‘an accidental and individual symbol for an [sic] universal one’, the poet recognises that ‘all symbols are fluxional [and] all language is vehicular and transitive’ (CW, III:20). As we have seen, Emerson’s philosophy of “process” forces him to repudiate any ‘symbol [that is] too stark and solid’; instead, he accepts that Nature is a ‘slippery Proteus’ and that ‘each individual symbol plays innumerable parts [in the whole]’ (CW, III:20). The poet (the world’s preeminent ‘analogist’), uses their secondary Imagination to perceive the ‘centuple or much more manifold meaning […] of every sensuous fact’ (CW, III:3), and thus, by subordinating nature to a ‘convenient alphabet’ (EL, I:224), they ‘convert […] the solid globe, the land, the sea, the sun, the animals into symbols of thought’ (CW, III:4). William Shakespeare, Emerson’s “representative” poet, ‘possesses [this] power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression […] beyond all poets’ (CW, I:31), whereas lesser poets fail to properly align their thought with the relevant symbols. True poets are thus instinctually ‘Namer[s] or Language-maker[s]’, able to uncover and give expression to an inexhaustive, primordial language of ‘fossil poetry’ (containing forgotten ‘images [and] tropes’), by naming a thing ‘because he sees it [so]’ (CW, III:13) in nature.

Yet, one may reasonably ask how is it possible for the “Poet-prophet” to gain these visionary insights into the underlying correspondences between humankind, nature, and the spiritual realm? To answer this, Emerson relies on an amalgamation of mythologies and Neoplatonic philosophies, stemming from mythic figures such as Orpheus and Merlin, to formulate what I shall call the “Bardic ideal”.37 As Hyatt H. Waggoner observes, Emerson (like Sir Philip Sidney), derived the role of the poet from the Latin word vates, meaning both ‘“diviner” [and] […] “prophetic speaker”’.38 To obtain the ‘condition of true naming’, the poet must ‘resign […] himself to the divine aura which breathes through [all] forms’ (CW, III:15). Through this ‘abandonment to the nature of things’, the poet becomes a receptacle and medium of the divine; their speech becomes ‘thunder’, their ‘thought […] law’, and their ‘words […] universally intelligible as the plants and animals’ (CW, III:15–16). However, the problem of ineffability continues to loom large. Emerson explicitly states that this Neoplatonic ‘union of man and God’ is ‘ineffable’ (CW, II:172) and beyond all ‘analysis’ (CW, II:37). Having ‘lie[d] in the lap of immense intelligence’ (CW, II: 37) and glimpsing into the underlying unity of all things, how can the “Poet-prophet” accurately convey these ‘undefinable [and] unmeasurable’ mystical experiences to readers in the imperfect medium of language, without their ‘speech becom[ing] less’ and lapsing into a final ‘noble […] silence’ (JMN, VIII:286–287)? As we shall see, almost all of Emerson’s poems succumb to these linguistic anxieties, thereby failing to embody his grand “Bardic ideal” in practice. It is only in his most fully accomplished poems, and also in his intensely poetical prose, that Emerson can momentarily transcend the inherent limitations of language to convey those ‘delicious awakenings of the higher powers’ (CW, I:30) where one becomes ‘part or particle of God’ (CW, I:10).

Emerson in Practice

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Emerson’s Poetic Theory and Practice

In his book In Defense of Reason, Yvor Winters condemns Emerson, among other things, for his failure to ‘practice […] what he preaches’.39 This statement belongs to a long tradition of Emersonian criticism which tends to foreground his dynamic poetic theory, whilst dismissing his actual verse for failing to embody the ideals he set forth.40 These readings tend to point towards his disciple Walt Whitman (and, to a lesser extent, Emily Dickinson), as more faithfully embodying the American poetic voice Emerson had envisaged.41 Yet, there remains a wider contradiction between Emerson the writer and Emerson the man, which may help to illuminate the startling difference between his poetic theory and practice. In a typically Wordsworthian manner, Emerson admits he has a ‘child’s love’ (CW, I:35) towards the natural world, and his journal testifies to a (largely ignored) capacity to ‘describe, with some particularity, natural facts he encountered in the local landscape’.42 However, Emerson’s characterisation as a misty-eyed idealist seeking universal laws beyond nature’s particulars, a man ‘so eager to know about the things in the heavens that he omitted to notice what was in front of him’, remains.43 This view of Emerson is by no means new; his fellow Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller portrayed him as a ‘man of ideas’ rather than an ‘ideal man’, and wished that ‘he might be thrown by conflicts on the lap of mother earth’ so that he could ‘interpret’ such themes as “Nature” and “Experience” with ‘the heart and genius of human life’.44

Emerson himself was acutely aware of these shortcomings, both in his poetry and in his life more generally. In his journal and letters, he admitted that ‘the capital defect of [his] nature’ was ‘the want of animal spirits’ (JMN, IX:18) and that his ‘bodily habit’ was ‘cold’.45 Emerson’s self-conscious inability to speak ‘wildly’ (CW, III:16) as a bardic poet is evident in his later journal entry of 1862: ‘I am a bard least of bards […] I cannot, like them, make lofty arguments in stately, continuous verse, constraining the rocks, trees, animals […] to say my thoughts’ (JMN, XV:308). Given these harsh self-appraisals, it is somewhat surprising that, throughout his life, Emerson refers to himself primarily as a poet; in letters to his second wife Lydia Jackson, he proclaims he was ‘born a poet’ (L, I:435), and that ‘in all [his] theory, ethics, & politics [he remained] a poet’ (L, III:18). Here, it is important to remember that Emerson’s definitions of a “Poet” are incredibly broad, encompassing not just writers of verse, but also prose authors, visionaries, preachers, and philosophers.46 The ‘true poet’, for Emerson, does not possess self-consciously ‘poetical talents, or […] industry and skill in metre’, but instead a genius for ‘metre-making argument[s]’ (CW, III:6).47 Through this largely unconscious process (which anticipates a significant expressionist development in American poetics), the inspired poet utters ‘a thought so passionate and alive’ that it will naturally, ‘like the spirit of a plant or an animal’, have an ‘architecture of its own’ (CW, III:6).48 This organic theory of poetry (later adopted by Thoreau) in which ‘thought is prior to the form’ (CW, III:7), implies that the poem develops according to the ‘universal’ (CW, II:19) laws of nature, rather than the arbitrary whims of the poet. ‘[P]oetry’, Emerson concludes, ‘is organic’ (CW, VIII:22).49 Yet, the ‘mechanical rhythm’ and ‘monotony’ of Emerson’s own verses call into question his underlying philosophical beliefs regarding the appropriate poetic methods to depict the flux of nature.50

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Since inspired thought precedes, and is superior to, static form, it would follow that Emerson’s poetry would reflect this ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ in Whitman-esque vers libre.51 However, more often than not, the formal constraints of his poetry (chiefly those relating to metre and rhyme) actively impede his expression of thought. Also, by employing coldly rational metres and conventional, stultifying rhymes, Emerson’s poems address the reader’s imperfect faculty of the “Understanding”, rather than the more suggestive powers of transcendental “Reason”. For example, his poem ‘Each and All’ employs a conventional Herbertian verse form, which stifles the poem’s final appeal to natural freedom embodied in the ‘rolling river’ and flight of the ‘morning bird’ (CW, IX:15).52 Moreover, ‘The Apology’ is formally written in five alternately rhymed quatrains, whilst his most famous poem, the ‘Concord Hymn’, is composed of conventionally rhymed iambic tetrameter.

In his desperate attempts to conform to strict poetic forms, Emerson produces poems which are often inconsistent and technically deficient.53 One of the most glaring formal weaknesses of Emerson’s poetry is his use of rhyme – specifically its forced and hackneyed quality.54 Emerson no doubt felt justified in his use of rhyme, given his frequent allusions to it as the pinnacle of poetic achievement; humans are instinctive ‘lovers of rhyme’ (CW, VIII:24), and ‘when we rise into the world of thought […] speech refines into [the] order and harmony’ (CW, VIII:28) found in rhymed verse. Following his organic theory of poetry, Emerson argues that the poet can only speak the “Language of Nature” by attuning himself to the rhymes spoken by Nature:

He heard a voice none else could hear

From centred and from errant sphere.

The quaking earth did quake in rhyme,

Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime (CW, VI:149).

If the earth itself ‘quake[s] in rhyme’, it follows that the poet too must speak in rhymes, thereby allowing them to utter ‘truth[s] which all Philistia is unable to challenge’ (CW, VIII:28). However, given the comparative dearth of rhyming words in the English language, Emerson must often resort to imperfect (or “slant”) rhymes, or simply rhyme words with themselves. As Waggoner has sharply observed, ‘[a]t times it seems that there is nothing, neither sense nor syntax, that Emerson is not willing to sacrifice to achieve a rhyme’.55 Waggoner points to the ‘glaring example’ of “My Garden” to illustrate:

The sowers made haste to depart,—

The wind and the birds which sowed it;

Not for fame, nor by rules of art,

Planted these, and tempests flowed it (CW, IX:434).

To achieve the ‘ludicrous’ rhymes ‘depart/art’ and ‘sowed it/flowed it’, Emerson must indeed sacrifice ‘word order […] good diction and good sense’, specifically in the use of the verb ‘flow’ in its transitive, rather than intransitive, form.56 Given Emerson’s fundamental conception of nature as a Heraclitean flux, it is surprising that his theory and practice of metre and rhyme instead seems to suggest a universe of coldly formal laws and fatalistic ‘necessity’ (CW, VI:11), with deadened rhymes tolling like the ‘bell of a cathedral’ (JMN VII:219). A reader of Emerson’s poems may justly ask, as God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind: ‘[c]anst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds’ and ‘thunder’ with a voice like Nature?57 It would appear that Emerson, at least in his poetry, cannot.

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Emerson and Religious Experience

Despite Emerson’s inability to fully manifest his poetic theory in the majority of his verses, his greatest poems (including ‘Uriel’, ‘Bacchus’, ‘Brahma’, and ‘Hamatreya’) should not be disregarded as failed attempts to embody the natural world in verse; rather, they can more fruitfully be viewed as efforts to embody ineffable spiritual truths in tangible forms. Following the aforementioned influences of Neoplatonism and Christian Mysticism, these poems engage in the tradition of Apophatic theology, or what Emerson calls the ‘high negative way’ (JMN, V:71), to describe intensely mystical experiences through negation.58 In such poems, rather than confidently glimpsing the noumenal reality beneath all appearances, of ‘things as they are in the eye of God’ (JMN, III:290), Emerson is forced to admit the absolute limitations of human knowledge when beholding the ineffable.

As William James observed in The Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the hallmarks of the mystical experience is its ‘ineffability’, which James defines as a ‘negative’ state of mind which ‘defies expression’ and ‘cannot be imparted or transferred to others’, least of all through the wholly imperfect medium of language.59 Emerson explicitly acknowledges this problem: ‘[e]very man’s words who speaks from [such experiences] must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought […] I dare not speak for it. My words […] fall short and cold’ (CW, II: 160). These ‘[divine] laws refuse to be adequately stated’ (CW, I:77) or ‘recorded in propositions’, and so ‘when we try to define and describe [God], both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages’ (CW, I:37). This sentiment is most clearly expressed in his poem ‘The Bohemian Hymn’, which R. A. Yoder has termed Emerson’s ‘fullest artistic version of negative theology’:60

In many forms we try      

To utter God’s infinity,    

But the boundless hath no form,    

And the Universal Friend 

Doth as far transcend

An angel as a worm.       

The great Idea baffles wit,

Language falters under it, 

It leaves the learned in the lurch;   

Nor art, nor power, nor toil can find

The measure of the eternal Mind,  

Nor hymn, nor prayer, nor church.61

In this poem, Emerson dramatises the mystical via negativa through naming various ‘forms’ which fail to capture ‘God’s infinity’, including ‘[l]anguage’, ‘art’, prayer[s]’, and ‘hymn[s]’. Given that the poem itself is framed as a hymn, Emerson seems to suggest that it will also fail to capture the ‘boundless’ nature of the divine. Yet, by defining it as a ‘Bohemian’ hymn (a probable allusion to the bohemian cultures flourishing across America at the time), Emerson seems to be suggesting that his poem, and his art more generally, will eschew social conventions such as the ‘church’ and men of traditional ‘learn[ing]’, seeking instead an aesthetics of self-reliant ‘nonconformi[ty]’ (CW, II: 29).

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Even a casual reader of Emerson’s poetry will recognise that his use of paradox is one of the primary techniques he uses when indirectly describing religious states of consciousness (and “Experience” more generally).62 Derived from his formal training in rhetoric, as well as his reading of the Metaphysical poets (specifically Herbert, whom he praised for his ability to ‘bend language to its fit expression’ (EL, I:350)) and Persian poetry, Emerson found in paradox a means by which to embody the fundamentally dialectical nature of reality. As Emerson saw, if God ‘communicates with us by hints, omens, inference and dark resemblances’ (CW, VIII:6), so too must the “Poet-prophet” emulate these gnomic, paradoxical modes of speech. Emerson praises the ‘Dialectic’ as the ‘science of sciences’, defining it as the process by which the ‘Intellect discriminat[es] the false and the true’ through the ‘observation of identity and diversity’ in all things (CW, IV:35).63 This ‘double consciousness’ (CW, I:213), the ability to present both thesis and antithesis without ‘any irritable reaching after fact and reason’, is essential for understanding Emersonian poetics, and, as we shall see, his prose works too.64

The eponymous figure in his impenetrable poem ‘The Sphinx’, placed at the start of his 1847 poetry collection, serves as the modus operandi for his later great poems. Like the vatic poet, the Sphinx (as the mythological embodiment of paradox) refuses to advance logical, straightforward questions, speaking instead in perplexing riddles: ‘Out of sleeping a waking | Out of waking a sleep’ (CW, IX:5). Characteristically, the Sphinxprovides an explicitly negative route to spiritual wisdom: to achieve a vision ‘profounder, | Man’s spirit must dive’ (CW, IX:7). Only the poet, who reasons dialectically, can appreciate these seemingly incomprehensible enigmas:

Say on, sweet Sphinx! thy dirges

        Are pleasant songs to me.

Deep love lieth under

        These pictures of time;

They fad in the light of

        Their meaning sublime (CW, IX:7).

Yet, even the poet is left speechless at the Sphinx’s final pronouncement: ‘“Who telleth one of my meanings, | Is master of all I am”’ (CW, IX:9). Crucially, these dialectical truths are beyond the mere “Understanding”, which foolishly seeks answers in ‘particulars’, ‘differences’, and ‘distracting variety’ (CW, IX:4). Thus, to approach such poetry productively, Emerson believes that the mind must employ the power of the “Reason” to ‘perce[ive] [the] identity [which] unites all things’ (CW, IX:4). Emerson returns to this concept of divinely paradoxical utterances in ‘Uriel’, a poem in which the angel’s voice thunders ‘round the sky’ with the gnomic force of absolute paradox: ‘[e]vil will bless, and ice will burn’ (CW, IX:34).65

In ‘Bacchus’, one of two Emerson poems which Harold Bloom views as inaugurating the ‘dialectic’ of American Romantic poetry, Emerson presents (like the Persian poet Hafiz) a self-surrender to divine ‘intoxicat[ion]’, which, paradoxically, provides the individual poet with the “key” to ‘unlock’ a truer reality behind mere appearances:66

[…] I, drinking this,      

Shall hear far Chaos talk with me;  

Kings unborn shall walk with me;

[…]

Quickened so, will I unlock           

Every crypt of every rock (CW, IX:233).

Drawing on Eastern poetry and philosophy in his poem ‘Brahma’, Emerson’s divine protagonist embodies the ‘Gnomic […] [and] unconnected verses’ he found in Persian poetry, which produce an ‘inconsecutiveness quite alarming to Western logic’ and ‘boundaries’ (CW, VIII:127).67 In the divine mind, opposing notions may be entertained without any seeming contradiction:

Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same;

The vanished gods to me appear;

And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

I am the hymn the Brahmin sings (CW, IX:365).

In ‘Hamatreya’, Emerson embodies paradox in the formal contrast between the voice of humankind and the voice of nature. In the first twenty-seven lines of the poem, Emerson presents the speech of the ‘landlords’ (CW, IX:68) in conventional blank rhyme, yet in the second ‘EARTH-SONG’ section, lasting thirty-six lines, the verse lapses into diploidic metre in an attempt to convey the mysteriously paradoxical truths of nature, spoken by the Earth itself:

“Mine and yours;

Mine, not yours.

Earth endures;

Stars abide—” (CW, IX:69)

The final four lines of the poem, spoken by the poet, also emulate this diploidic metre, suggesting the poetic self has become more thoroughly integrated with nature and has learnt to accept a dialectical view of the universe, combining fiery ‘lust’ with ‘the chill of the grave’ (CW, IX:70).

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Emerson’s Poetic Prose

Emerson’s most striking and sustained use of paradox, however, is found in his prose writings, both in their individual sentences and overall structure.68 In prose, as many critics have observed, Emerson found the form most congenial to documenting those ‘fleeting and evanescent flowers of the mind’.69 By emulating other ‘prose poets’ (CW, VIII:27), Emerson is able to come closest to giving a tangible account of ‘divine illumination’, when, during his ‘daily walk’, he becomes ‘elevated by intercourse with the spiritual world’ (CW, I:145):

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God (CW, I:10).

Echoing Plotinus’ Ennead IV, which describes a state where ‘everybody is pure, and each inhabitant […] an eye’, Emerson’s beatific vision displays all four of James’s hallmarks of the mystical experience.70 In its tortured syntax, abstract descriptions, and contradictions (‘I am nothing; I see all’), it is evidently an ‘[i]neffable’ experience; the complete loss of self implies a ‘[p]assivity’ on the subject’s part; this state of mind is also characterised by ‘[t]ransiency’ since Emerson quickly returned to ‘the light of common day’ on the ‘bare common […] at twilight’ (CW, I:10).71 However, perhaps the most significant aspect of this experience is its ‘[n]oetic quality’, which yielded an ‘insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect’, specifically that of the ‘occult relation between man and vegetable’ (CW, I:10) and the interconnectedness of all living things.72

* * *

Since the publication of Nature, readers continue to charge Emerson’s prose with ‘vagueness of expression’, no doubt because the medium implies a greater level of objectivity and logical rigour.73 It should be clear, however, that any reader approaching Emerson as a clear elucidator of coherent definitions and ‘digested systems’ (CW, I:41) will be disappointed. Instead, given that Emerson consciously frustrates a passive, ‘habitually discursive reading’ of prose, one must ‘adjust [one’s] normal reading habits’ by approaching his prose works as far more poetic and artistic in character, functioning indirectly through constant associations, suggestions, and negations.74 Though his essays offer only ‘imperfect theories’ and ‘sentences […] which contain glimpses of truth’ (CW, I:10), they continue to elicit quasi-religious conversions in readers, functioning much the same way as a passionate sermon delivered by a ‘rapt saint’ (CW, I:122) or Victorian sage (such as Emerson’s contemporaries Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold) would. The profoundly transformative effect of Emerson’s prose was most famously attested to by Whitman, who was ‘simmering, simmering, simmering [until] Emerson brought [him] to a boil’, and later by Moncure Conway, who was given the ‘touch of flame [he] needed’ by reading Emerson.75 In more secular terms, Stanley Cavell has referred to this poetic prose style as enacting Emersonian “Self-Reliance”, provoking the reader to engage in ‘aversive thinking’ by calling into question society’s commonly accepted definitions and conventions.76

Emerson, like his disciple Whitman, did not fear to ‘contradict [himself]’ in his essays, for he was indeed ‘large’ and ‘contain[ed] multitudes’.77 By refusing to offer final, conclusive definitions of existential topics such as “Experience”, “Beauty”, and “Nature”, Emerson became the Socratic gad-fly of Concord, exhorting readers to consider possibilities rather than fixities; to disregard ‘consistency’ as the ‘foolish […] hobgoblin of little minds’ (CW, II:33); and finally to ‘[t]rust thyself’ (CW, II:28) even when one may be ‘misunderstood’ (CW, II:34). Despite being unable to fulfil his grand theories in poetry, Emerson nonetheless laid the critical foundations for the modern American poetic tradition, stretching from Whitman to Wallace Stevens. For all his formal inadequacies, Emerson always remained an ‘experimenter’, and his poetical essays remain the chief proof of this. This ‘endless seeker, with no Past at [his] back’ (CW, II:188), squarely confronted the tragedy of our need to express ourselves in the fundamentally flawed medium of language. Yet, by defiantly urging humankind to ‘Say on’! (CW, IX:7), to ‘unsettle all things’ (CW, II:188) and refuse to capitulate one’s private ‘infinitude’ (JMN, VII:342) and innermost integrity in the search for fundamental truths of nature and the spirit, Emerson rightly deserves to be regarded as the founding father of the Transcendentalist movement, and of American culture more generally.

Part II: Henry David Thoreau

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Thoreau in Theory: Idealist or Empiricist?

In his biography of Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing highlighted two key aspects of his life; firstly, that there was a ‘philological side’ to much of his writings, and secondly, that Thoreau should properly be conceived of as a ‘Poet-Naturalist’.78 Like his mentor Emerson, Thoreau was keenly interested in the language theories of the eighteenth century, as well as philological studies carried out by American contemporaries such as Horace Bushnell, Richard Chenevix Trench, and Charles Kraitsir. All of his works, both published and unpublished, display a life-long fascination with language, including its origins (as traced through the etymological roots of words) and its infinitely malleable possibilities (exemplified by his frequent use of wordplay and puns). Thoreau, like Emerson, also believed that there was an underlying “Language of Nature” which could be interpreted by the poet through their finely attuned senses, and then translated into words. Thus, in many aspects of his early philosophy (encapsulated in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers), Thoreau seemed to echo Emerson’s idealistic strain of Transcendentalism, which emphasised the power of the Imagination to discern the eternal laws of nature, over a more empirical study of the natural world and its particulars.79

However, as Thoreau became more passionately engaged with both natural history (especially botany), and the physical world itself, he recognised that humans could only ‘discover infinite change in particulars only’, rather than in ‘generals’.80 This, perhaps, is the fundamental disagreement between Emerson and Thoreau; while both thinkers esteemed truth above all else, their conflict rested on the means by which one could apprehend this noumenal ‘reality’ (W, p. 400). Whereas Emerson the idealist believed that truth could only be apprehended through the transcendental power of the “Reason” (explaining his failure to truly immerse himself in the particulars of nature), Thoreau the empiricist came to realise that the only way to obtain true knowledge was to pay closer attention to the ‘particular instance[s]’ of nature’s methods in specific flora and fauna, which may contradict some ‘hast[y]’ assumption of a ‘universal law’.81 Thus, rather than ‘esteem[ing] truth [as] remote’, Thoreau affirmed that one could ‘apprehend […] all [that] is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds [us]’ (W, p. 399, emphasis mine). This is reflected in his later works, where Thoreau’s prose becomes increasingly focused on the minutiae of nature in an attempt to more accurately convey his sensory perceptions of the physical world, rather than using nature merely as a framework in which to discuss his more abstract theories of poetry, philosophy, and religion.82

* * *

Thoreau’s search for a proper relation to the natural world led him to travel widely along the East coast of America (as depicted in his travel narratives The Maine Woods and Cape Cod) and live for two years in a self-built cabin at Walden Pond. Embodying the ideal of Emersonian “Self-Reliance”, Thoreau sought to ‘live deliberately’ and ‘front only the essential facts of life’ through a ‘Spartan-like’ mode of ‘simplicity’ (W, p. 394). Thoreau hoped to make himself ‘as simple and well as Nature’ by taking up the physical world ‘into [his] pores’ (W, p. 384) and ‘suck[ing] out all the marrow of life’ (W, p. 394). Humans, for Thoreau, needed to live a ‘natural life’, and become not only ‘spiritualized’, but ‘naturalized […] on the soil of earth’ (AW, p. 307). By immersing his body in nature more fully than his mentor Emerson ever achieved, Thoreau was able to apprehend and describe a transcendental ‘nature behind the ordinary’ (AW, p. 311), chiefly through applying his ‘pure senses’ to their divine uses (as opposed to their ‘trivial […] [and] grovelling uses’ (AW, p. 310)). Thoreau could indeed hear the ‘celestial sounds’ and ‘behold [the] beauty now invisible’ which Emerson alluded to in his essays yet maintained that this could only be achieved through a ‘purely sensuous life’ (AW, p. 310). Thus, as Joel Porte argues: ‘in Thoreau […] other Transcendentalists were unknowingly harboring a Lockean in their midst’.83

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Thoreau’s Philosophy of Language

Given his emphasis on the importance of the material, it is not surprising that Thoreau, like Emerson, believed that all words found their origins in the physical world, and gestured towards the uncovering of a ‘universal language’ (AW, p. 49) which would reunite humankind with nature.84 A key influence on Thoreau’s philosophy of language was the ‘[o]nomatopoetic’ theories of Hungarian-American philologist Charles Kraitsir, introduced to him through Elizabeth Peabody.85 In his books Significance of the Alphabet and Glossology, Kraitsir argued that underlying all ‘human tongues’, there remained an ‘essential’ and ‘universal language’, since ‘[m]ankind has essentially the same reason, and […] organs of speech’.86 All languages could be linked through three common sounds (or “germs”) formed by the human mouth, corresponding symbolically to the natural world.87 Rejecting the empiricist theory of language as ‘a mere arbitrary contrivance’, Kraitsir argued that humans, as ‘mirror of [and] […] mediator between […] all objects’, employ onomatopoeic sounds to reflect an internal perception of the physical world, thereby linking ‘the world with man and man with man’.88 Kraitsir believed that humankind had forgotten the ‘symbolism of [these] sounds […] in consequence of the fading of the primordial poetry of the human mind’ and thus sought to reinvigorate language with a greater ‘intuitiveness and liveliness’ by reminding people of these lost symbols through the science of Glossology.89

Thoreau’s philosophy of language clearly shows Kraitsir’s influence, for example in his etymological excavations in Walden; his recurrent interest in the sounds of nature; and in the distinction between ‘the spoken and the written language, the language heard and read’ (W, p. 403). However, rather than following Kraitsir in subordinating language to speech, Thoreau partially rejects human speech (the ‘mother tongue’) as ‘transitory […] a dialect merely, almost brutish’, which we ‘learn […] unconsciously’, instead elevating written language (the ‘father tongue’) as the ‘maturity and experience’ of speech, being used only for ‘reserved and select expression’ (W, p. 403).90 Thoreau sought to counter the degeneration and ‘trivialness’ of contemporary spoken language (found, for example, in the orator’s ‘occasional bursts of eloquence’ to the ‘mob before him’), by returning to the ‘heroic books’ of the classical age, which were universally addressed ‘to the intellect and heart of mankind’, thus coming ‘nearest to life itself’ (W, pp. 403–04, emphasis mine).91 Like Emerson, Thoreau desired active and etymologically minded reading of texts, urging readers to ‘laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line’ in order to rescue what would otherwise be ‘a language dead to degenerate times’ (W, p. 403). His frequent use of puns and wordplay (shown in his famous “sandbank” passage of Walden (pp. 565-68), which enacts Kraitsir’s theory of linguistic “germs”), highlight his conviction that each word has ‘more than one interpretation’ (W, p. 581).92 Yet, for all of his emphasis on the written word, Thoreau also maintained Kraitsir’s fascination with non-linguistic natural sounds, which constitutes ‘the [universal] language which all things and events speak without metaphor’ (W, p. 411). Thoreau fervently believed that humans would be in ‘danger of forgetting’ (W, p. 411) this natural language if they continued to disconnect themselves from the natural world.93

* * *

Drawing on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “organic” theories of language, Kraitsir similarly posited ‘language [as] a living organism’ closely linked to natural facts and processes, which could be interpreted by humankind to reveal the key to the natural world.94 Thoreau accepted this definition wholeheartedly, arguing that the ‘earth is not a mere fragment of dead history […] to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly’; rather, it must be “read” as ‘living poetry like the leaves of a tree’ (W, p. 568, emphasis mine). This was not a ‘fossil earth’ but a ‘living earth’, a ‘hieroglyph’ pregnant with meaning (W, p. 568), whose ‘facts’ were to be diligently studied in the hope they would ‘one day flower into truth’ (CEP, p. 41).95 In one of his most important contributions to modern ecocriticism, Thoreau recognised the importance of employing vibrant, living words when naming and describing nature.96 This conception of words as living organisms explains Thoreau’s sustained critique of the ‘torpid […] wooden [and] lifeless words’ (PJ, V:221) of modern naturalists (such as ‘Linnaean’ botanists), who produced ‘manual[s] of botany’ which were as ‘dry as a hortus siccus’ (PJ, IV:306). As a “Poet-Naturalist”, Thoreau saw that such attempts to classify natural phenomenon according to Latin names reduce all things described to ‘dead matter’, since the words used fail to capture the ‘vital spirit’ (J, XIII:154) of all living things.97 Instead, Thoreau embraced English Renaissance naturalists such as Edward Topsell and John Gerard who approached nature poetically through the senses, employing a ‘Gramatica parda’ (“tawny grammar”) to represent this ‘wild and dusky knowledge of true nature’ (CEP, p. 249, emphasis mine).98

Thoreau’s definition of himself as ‘a mystic […] a transcendentalist’, yet also ‘a natural philosopher to boot’ (PJ, V:469) highlights his paradoxical relationship with science. This is alluded to in Channing’s biographical title “Poet-Naturalist”, and later codified by C. P. Snow in his thesis of The Two Cultures – namely, the ‘gulf’ between the literary-minded poet and the scientific-minded naturalist.99 Given the public conception of Transcendentalism as a vague philosophy concerned with ‘whatever was unintelligible’, how could the poet, dealing in abstract concepts such as truth and beauty which ‘men cannot describe’, offer anything of value to the coldly rational scientist, who primarily deals with ‘things as men describe them’ (AW, p. 314)?100 Thoreau believed this distinction between the ‘narrow and partial […] common sense view’ of the scientist/naturalist, and the ‘infinitely expanded and liberat[ed]’ (AW, P. 314) view of the poet, to be misguided, and felt these two ‘different departments of knowledge’ (CEP, p. 394) needed to be reconciled if he was to develop a larger, more totalising rerum natura. Thoreau’s primary obstacle in formulating and conveying this new philosophy effectively to the common reader was a linguistic one – namely, a dilemma of representation. Thoreau sought to accurately “write” nature without poetically ‘exaggerat[ing] her wonders’ (AW, p. 156) for literary effect, whilst also refusing to ‘exchange [the] infinite value[s]’ of truth and beauty for the ‘relative and finite one[s]’ of the narrow-minded scientist (which would mean ‘gain[ing] the whole world and los[ing] [his] own soul!’).101 Thus, Thoreau’s ideal poet would not advance ‘cut and dried […] schemes’ of the ‘universe’, but would instead represent the natural world as it appeared to his senses – living, breathing and bursting with vitality – thereby forcing both the abstract poet and the rational scientist to ‘[e]xamine [the] authority’ (AW, p. 57) upon which their narrow presuppositions are founded.

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The Role of the Poet-Naturalist

Thoreau’s ideal poet, like Emerson’s, undertook a fundamentally salvific role; that of expressing the ‘loftiest written […] wisdom of mankind’ (AW, p. 74) by ‘derivi[ing] [language] […] originally from nature’ (J, XIII:145) and ‘nail[ing] words to their primitive senses’ (CEP, p. 244). For Thoreau, it is the “Poet-Naturalist”, rather than the scientist, who properly ‘understands’ and ‘makes the truest use’ of nature through ‘immortal[ising]’ (TMW, p. 685) it in their poetry. In his book The Song of the Earth, Jonathan Bate acknowledges that modern ecocritics have come to see ‘language and imagination […] as realms that are split from nature’, leading to a ‘crisis of represent[ing]’ nature in literature.102 Thoreau confronts this “crisis” through positing the ideal of the “Poet-Naturalist”, which prefigures Bate’s notion of ‘ecopoetics’ in their ability to create ‘works of art’ which allow readers to ‘imagine what it might be like to live […] upon the earth’ in greater harmony.103 The problem, as Thoreau saw it, was that there were no modern authors sufficiently inured in nature to compose this “Song of the Earth”. Indeed, Thoreau continually laments that ‘no human inhabitant […] appreciates [nature]’ (W, p. 482) or the ‘beauty of the landscape’ (CEP, p. 251), amidst a larger concern that perhaps art more generally ‘can never match the luxury and superfluity of Nature’ (AW, p. 260), whose ‘poem’ will not ‘bear to be compared’ with any ‘work of man’ (AW, p. 306).

In searching for poetic models of expression, Thoreau looks to bardic poets of the past, such as Homer, Ossian, and Chaucer, and also to American Indians and outdoor labourers, all of whom are united through their intimate connection with nature. In the former three figures, Thoreau finds poetry infused with the fundamental processes of nature: ‘sentences [that were] written while grass grew and water ran’ (AW, p. 74). As outlined by Fred Lorch, Thoreau followed his mentor Emerson in his conception of an “organic” poetic theory, believing that all poetry is a ‘natural fruit’ (AW, p. 74).104 These bards, through their connection with nature, ‘bear […] a poem’ as ‘naturally as the oak bears an acorn’ (AW, p. 74). In this largely unconscious compositional process, the ‘poetic frenzy’ (AW, p. 278) seizes them, and they speak ‘as if it were a message from the gods’ (AW, p. 75). Homer, a poet ‘as serene as nature’, has been ‘furnished […] with words’ from nature itself, and thus his most ‘memorable passages are as naturally bright as gleams of sunshine in misty weather’ (AW, p. 75). Similarly, the ‘grandeur of the similes’ in the poetry of Ossian signifies a ‘gigantic and universal language […] so massive that it cannot be less than natural’ (AW, p. 282). Thoreau even ventures as far as to call Chaucer the ‘personification of spring’ (AW, p. 299), possessing a Wordsworthian ‘childlike love of Nature’ which is ‘hardly to be found in any [later] poet’ (AW, p. 303). Regrettably, Thoreau believed the ‘pleasant’ and ‘civilized’ contemporary English poets had ‘come within doors’ and thus failed to emulate the ‘bardic rage’ (AW, p. 298) which could give voice to the ‘savager, […] more primeval aspects of nature’ (AW, p. 46).105

* * *

In his search for a contemporary expression of nature, it is not surprising that Thoreau seeks those who physically inhabit the natural world and know it by ‘direct intercourse and sympathy’ (CEP, p. 41). By ‘spending their lives in the fields and woods’, Thoreau believes ‘[f]ishermen, hunters, [and] woodchoppers’ have a ‘more favorable mood for observing [nature]’ (W, p. 490) than those living in cities. In keeping with his desire for ‘simplicity’ (W, p. 395), Thoreau links a deliberate life in nature with a ‘tougher [and] […] firm[er]’ writing style, akin to ‘the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine’ (AW, p. 86). This manifests as practical advice in Walden, where Thoreau urges people to ‘construct […] dwellings with their own hands’, in the hope that their ‘poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds […] [also] sing when they are so engaged’ (W, p. 359). Another source of poetic inspiration was his interactions with American Indians, whose ‘forest life’ allows them ‘a rare and peculiar society with Nature’ (AW, p. 46) in which ‘a thousand revelations [have been made] to them which are still secrets to [American colonisers]’ (TMW, p. 731).106 As with the naturalists of the English Renaissance, Thoreau found that American Indian names seemed to ‘imply a more practical and vital science’ than the names given in modern science’s ‘botanies’ (J, X:294). For example, in tracing the etymology of the native word ‘Ktaadn’ (referring to the highest mountain in Maine), Thoreau finds the word aptly means ‘Highest Land’ (TMW, p. 801).107 In hearing their language and accent, Thoreau found a much sought-after ‘wild and primitive American sound’ (TMW, p. 696), comparable to nature itself, reminding him of ‘wind among the pines, or the booming of the surf on the shore’ (TMW, p. 722).

Though his poetry, like Emerson’s, never came close to embodying the ‘condensed wisdom of mankind’ (AW, p. 74), Thoreau found that the medium of prose (specifically in his private journal) allowed him to faithfully transcribe the “Language of Nature”, as it was revealed to his senses through mystical states of communion with the physical world. Thoreau’s task was clear: he had taken it upon himself to personally ‘rescue language’ from its trivial modern uses through ‘heroic writing’, a process by which he hoped to finally record the ‘nation[al] scripture’ of America and its environment.108

Thoreau in Practice

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Thoreau’s Shift from Poetry to Prose

Emerson’s 1862 eulogy makes clear the distinction between Thoreau’s poetic ‘genius’ and ‘talent’ (CW, X:426), elevating the former over the latter. For Emerson, while his protégé lacked ‘lyric faculty and technical skill’ and his verses were ‘often rude and defective’, he possessed the ‘source of poetry in his spiritual perception’ (CW, X:426) of nature. The problem Emerson alludes to is one of translation; Thoreau ‘held all actual written poems in very light esteem in […] comparison’ to the natural world, no doubt because they failed to capture its true ‘spiritual beauty’ (CW, X:426). As many critics have observed, Thoreau’s verse, like Emerson’s, failed to adequately represent or enact his poetic theories.109 Despite continuing to regard himself as a poet throughout his life, Thoreau gradually came to accept that he could find an ‘equal poetic charm in [the medium of] prose’ (CW, X:426), rather than verse. This was due in part to his process of composition; as Elizabeth Hall Witherell has shown, Thoreau’s ‘organic method of composition’, developed in the 1840s, became increasingly ‘inimical to poetry’.110 Rather than treating ‘form and content [as] inseparable’, Witherell argues that Thoreau approached poetry as a ‘prose writer’ through the gradual ‘accreti[on]’ of particular facts; for example, in his poem ‘The Fall of the Leaf’, he continued to revise the poem by ‘add[ing] stanzas from other poems’ for weeks after the initial poetic inspiration.111 In accepting his inadequacies as a poet, who could only produce ‘tame verses that [were] almost too fluent [and] pleasant’, Thoreau turned to the ‘more flexible’ form of prose, where ‘one [could] retain the essence of an idea despite modifications of form’ and thus successfully express the ‘grandeur of [his] thought’ (AW,p. 278).112

Thoreau’s editing process is also evident in his prose works (specifically A Week and Walden), which were revised significantly from their original drafts prior to their publication. As Sharon Cameron has argued, this testifies to a significantly performative aspect of his published works, whereby the expectation of a literary audience forces Thoreau to describe nature according to the ‘circumscriptions of literary conventions’ such as ‘beginnings […] endings and representative symbols’.113 Yet, the commercial failure of his first book A Week forced Thoreau to reconsider his role as a writer and his relation to the public.114 Indeed, in the conclusion to his next book, Walden, Thoreau consolidates his purpose in A Week (that is, to compose ‘a sentence which no intelligence can understand’ (AW, p. 122)), by emphatically pronouncing: ‘I desire to speak somewhere without bounds’ (W, p. 580).115 Thoreau rejects the ‘ridiculous demand which England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you’, fearing instead that his expression will not be ‘extra-vagant enough’, so as to be ‘adequate to [express] the truth of which [he has] been convinced [of]’ (W, p. 580). By abandoning public legibility and embracing his often contradictory experiences of nature, Thoreau’s later writings (especially in his journal) shift away from an exploration of the self’s relation to a wider human ‘culture’, towards a focus on the solitary self ‘as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature’ (CEP, p. 225) itself.

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Writing Nature

In his book Nature Writing and America, Peter A. Fritzell outlines the inherent contradictions in Thoreau’s life-long attempt to “write” nature:

To deny the self and affirm the environment. To deny the environment and celebrate the self. To view the self as a product of its environment and the environment as a product of the self. To view the self as a metaphor for the environment and the environment as a metaphor of or for the self. Such is the habit and the strategy of the self-conscious ecologist, the man at Walden.116

Given his aforementioned belief in language’s inadequacies (specifically when attempting to capture the vastness of the physical world), Thoreau could not simply ‘speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness’ (CEP, p. 225) in an unproblematic manner. Thoreau admits that his heroic task lacks precedent: he cannot find any ‘literature which gives expression to Nature’, nor any ‘poetry to quote which adequately expresses [a true] yearning for the Wild’ (CEP, p. 244–45). Thus, Thoreau became one of the first American writers to grapple with Fritzell’s paradoxes.

Modern ecocritics, following Buell’s fourfold criteria for a true ‘Environmental Text’, have tended to distinguish between Thoreau’s early tendency to poeticise, aestheticise, and anthropomorphise nature through the use of figurative language in his published works, and his later inclination to suppress his poetic voice in favour of a more objective, scientific style in his private journal.117 In such readings, there is an implicit assumption that figurative descriptions of nature, through the ‘intrusion of metaphor’, somehow reduces the environment to ‘merely […] a framing device’ for human interests, thus preventing nature from speaking its true language.118 Yet, any casual reader of Thoreau’s body of work will recognise that one of his most remarkable attributes as a nature writer is his talent for making the reader see what he is describing through whatever literary means available, employing both figurative language and close scientific observation – even in later essays such as ‘Autumnal Tints’. Thus, in addressing the ‘central Romantic question’ of one’s ‘relation to the nature’ one sees, I follow Stephen Spratt in rejecting ecocritics such as Sharon Cameron who argue that Thoreau’s ‘passion for nature […] subordinates human presence […] [in] its own sustained, enviably unself-conscious, and absolutely forthright documentation’ of the physical world.119 Instead, as Spratt argues, without ‘figurative modes of representation’ and other ‘uniquely human acts of meaning-making’ which seek connections between humankind and its surroundings, the natural world would be bereft of ‘significan[ce]’.120 Thoreau himself understood this, declaring: ‘[a] fact stated barely is dry’, since it ‘must [have] the vehicle of some humanity’ (J, XIII:160) to ‘move the hearer’ (J, III:86). For example, in ‘Autumnal Tints’, Thoreau employs both figurative techniques (including metaphor and hyperbole), as well as intensely empirical observations of the woodlands of New England, in order to appeal to the reader’s imagination and exhort them to put down his essay, ‘ascend the hills’ and ‘look for [nature]’ (CEP, p. 393) themselves.121

* * *

Despite Thoreau’s committed use of figurative language, there are often moments in his work where the natural world actively resists representation, and he is therefore forced to push language to its outermost limits of expression, in an attempt to communicate the landscape in words. In contrast to the more benign, playful version of nature presented in Walden, Thoreau’s ascent of Mount Katahdin in The Maine Woods depicts a ‘primeval, untamed, and forever untamable [sic] Nature’ (TMW, p. 645) which is actively hostile to human life. As in Emerson’s ‘Hamatreya’, Thoreau gives voice to the Earth itself, yet, in the shift to the biblical register of the Old-Testament, Thoreau presents nature not as a reassuring presence, but instead as a ‘sternly’ detached lawgiver.122 This ‘inhuman Nature’ berates Thoreau personally, asking: ‘Why seek me where I have not called thee?’, where the ‘ground is not prepared for you’. (TMW, p. 640). In ‘witness[ing] [his] own limits transgressed’ (TMW, p. 575), Thoreau is forced to admit his narrowly anthropological view of the world (which is ‘acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe’ (TMW, p. 586)), and instead accept that ‘[t]he universe is wider than [his] views of it’ (W, p. 577). At the climax of his ascent, Thoreau confronts ‘pure Nature’, made out of ‘Chaos and Old Night’ (TMW, p. 645), in a sublimely existential experience which leaves him questioning the ontological boundaries between his body, the Cartesian self, and the rest of the natural world:123

I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? (TMW, p. 646).

In the compressed use of exclamation marks, fragmented syntax, frantic questions and literary allusions to the Bible and Paradise Lost, Thoreau searches desperately for a linguistic register to make sense of his experience, yet in the end is forced to accept the sheer ineffability of the encounter, also leaving the reader in a similar state of uncertainty and doubt.

* * *

Ecocritics who wish to emphasise Thoreau’s later, more objective prose style as a more faithful representation of the natural world fail to take into consideration his own fears that the ‘character of [his] knowledge’ was ‘becoming more distinct and scientific’ as he grew older, meaning he could only see ‘details […] not wholes’ (PJ, III:380).124 One must recognise that it was precisely the inexhaustible mystery and vastness of nature which attracted Thoreau to study it, through a method of intensely mystical empiricism which yielded sensory experiences often impossible to convey to readers in words. For example, throughout his travel narrative Cape Cod, a book which presents an ‘unwearied and illimitable ocean’ (CC, p. 891) of Melvillian proportions, Thoreau continually appeals to the reader’s senses, chiefly the faculty of hearing. Thoreau urges readers not to forget that the ‘dash and roar of the waves were incessant’ (CC, p. 938), yet concedes that he ‘may havemade no impression on [the reader’s] mind’ of the sea’s ‘roar’ or the cries of the ‘beach-birds’ (CC, p. 1036).125 The failure of language to induce sensory experiences in the reader even leads Thoreau to recommend that the book be read ‘with a large conch-shell at [the reader’s] ear’ (CC, p. 938). This sustained exploration of the nature of sensory experiences has enabled Kerry McSweeney to compose a ‘sensory profile of Thoreau’, which relegates touch, taste and smell as having ‘comparatively little value’ for him, in comparison with the two primary senses of hearing and sight. These latter two senses were of particular importance as they maintained a distance between subject and object (such as when hearing the ‘strain from the telegraph harp’ (J, IV:206)), thereby allowing Thoreau to intuit nature’s ‘mythical and mystical’ (CEP, p. 37) quality, including those distant ‘sounds in nature which [his] ears could never hear’ (PJ, I: 365) and sights he could never comprehend.126 These rare synaesthetic moments of religious ‘extacy’ (PJ, III:305), where ‘the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore’ (W, p. 425) provided Thoreau with essential spiritual nourishment throughout his life.

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The Ecstasies of Nature

Thoreau’s gradual accumulation of facts in his journal may seem difficult to reconcile with his Neoplatonic theory of inspiration, which proposed that true knowledge can only be arrived at through a sudden flash of insight ‘which [humankind] cannot detect’ (J, VIII:45). Yet, Thoreau believed this sudden God-like intuition could only be facilitated through mystical self-discipline and ‘religious exercise[s]’ (W, p. 393); in Thoreau’s case, this meant immersing himself in nature ‘all day [and] all night’, obsessively recording natural phenomenon in order to finally ‘detect some trace of the ineffable’ (J, II:471).127 In keeping with his desire that nature be fundamentally unknowable, Thoreau concedes that his ‘desire for knowledge is intermittent’, whereas his need to ‘bathe [his] head in atmospheres unknown to [himself] is perennial and constant’ (CEP, p. 250). These experiences (variously described as ‘transient thought[s], […] vision[s] [and] dream[s]’ (AW, p. 113)) continually reminds Thoreau to appreciate the ‘insufficiency of all that [he calls] Knowledge’ (CEP, p. 250), while also re-affirming the impossibility of representing these experiences through the public medium of language. Indeed, Thoreau continually questions how he could ‘communicate with the gods […] and not be insane’ (AW, p. 113) and even chastises an imagined mystic in A Week for their over-confident attempts to ‘fable […] the ineffable’ and thereby ‘put mysteries into words’ (AW, p. 58). These fears lead Thoreau to ultimately give his most accurate and uninhibited depictions of such mystical states in his private journal, where he did not fear the contradictory or paradoxical nature of these experiences, nor the prospect of being misunderstood by the wider public.128

In searching for literary models to express the ‘sublime truth[s]’ (AW, p. 123) of nature, Thoreau (like Emerson) turns to the philosophies of the East, specifically the religious texts of Hinduism, including the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedas (which emphasise non-dualistic states of being), as well as contemporary philological studies.129 In the works of Irish philologist Richard Chenevix Trench, Thoreau found the ‘truly poetical words […] transport, rapture, ravishment [and] ecstasy’, which had the desired ‘effect of music’ by ‘inspir[ing], elevat[ing], [and] expand[ing]’ (PJ, V:444) the listener when the words were spoken aloud.130 The word Thoreau continually returns to is “ecstasy” (derived from the Greek ekstasis, meaning to “stand outside oneself”) to describe such moments of spiritual transcendence.131 Yet, unlike most mystics who seek to escape from the physical world of messy particulars to the eternal world of the divine, Thoreau’s mysticism is unique in that he ‘attained the end of a Plotinian philosopher – the union of his own center with the center of all things – by purely Lockean means’.132 In these moments of intense sensory integration, where the subject-object divide momentarily dissolves, Thoreau can simultaneously ‘see, smell, taste, hear, feel […] Something to which we are allied’ (AW, p. 140). Given his similar experiences of ‘the presence of something kindred to [him]’, where ‘[e]very little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended [him]’ (W, p. 427, emphasis mine), one can venture to suggest that this “Something” is an expression of the fundamental interconnectedness of all living beings in nature.133 Thus, following Buell’s concept of the ‘aesthetics of relinquishment’, Thoreau draws upon mystical/religious practices only insofar as it allows him to imagine the world from the perspective of nature itself (exemplified in his ‘almost animistic evocation of Walden [Pond] as a living presence’ or character), thereby calling into question the ‘validity of the self as the primary focalizing device for both writer and reader’.134 Through recognising himself as a natural being, composed of ‘leaves and vegetable mould’, Thoreau could finally obtain what he spent his whole life in search of: an intimate ‘intelligence with the earth’ (W, p. 432).

* * *

Yet, Thoreau continued to believe that this state of absolute union with the natural world would be disrupted by the self-conscious act of writing. Even the desire to maintain a journal, that most immediate form of transcribing the relation between words and things, proved difficult for Thoreau, since any ‘important experience rarely [allows] us to remember such obligations’ (AW, p. 270) to transcribe it. Instead, Thoreau was convinced that even the ‘most excellent speech’ (and written words) ‘finally falls into silence’, that ‘universal refuge […] [and] sole oracle’ of truth which is universally ‘audible to all men, at all times, in all places’ (AW, p. 318, emphasis mine). In his sublime encomium to ‘Silence’ at the conclusion of A Week, Thoreau modestly accepts that he is unable to ‘interrupt [this] Silence’ since it ‘cannot be done into English’ (AW, p. 319). Thus, Thoreau, perhaps even more so than Emerson, urges a mystical humility in the face of language’s inadequacies, whilst also gesturing to those irrefutably higher realities of existence which humankind can only partially glimpse and fleetingly transcribe:

The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched (W, p. 495).

❁

Conclusion

​

Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson embody two opposing yet interrelated aspects of American Transcendentalism; on the one hand, Thoreau’s legacy can be defined through his particular actions in the physical world (including his Walden experiment, his enacted “Civil Disobedience” and his investigations of natural history), whereas Emerson’s legacy, aptly enough, can be defined through the ideas he formulated (chiefly those of “Self-Reliance”, and a personal, unmediated connection with the divine). Yet, unlike many critics who would rather set the protégé in stark contrast to the mentor, I believe this study has shown that Thoreau and Emerson are more closely related than these critics would allow for. It is their common preoccupation with language and words, specifically their explorations of the universal origins of language; the relations between language and the natural world; and the primary role of the Poet in re-connecting humankind to nature, which highlights their intellectual affinity. Though both Emerson and Thoreau failed to embody their poetic theories in practice, their theoretical frameworks set the conditions, and expanded the possibilities, for the next century and a half of American poetry and prose. Moreover, their cultural influence and afterlives are not only restricted to America; in their Romantic quest to adequately express their individual experience of nature and the spirit, these two founding fathers of American literature and culture exemplify Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur. Through drawing not only upon the literary and philosophical traditions of England and Europe, but also the indigenous traditions of the Americas, as well as the classical traditions of Asia, Asia-Minor, and the Middle-East, these two proto-cosmopolitans indeed proved that ‘poetry is the universal possession of mankind’.135 This wide-ranging, transnational influence on fields as diverse as nature writing, continental philosophy, and poetics more generally, is a testament to both thinkers as an enduring source of inspiration, and I believe that book-length studies exploring these affinities would prove fruitful in the future.136

In confronting the imperfect medium of language as a vehicle to communicate one’s innermost experiences, whilst heroically continuing in their attempt to transcribe their lives in words, Emerson and Thoreau bequeathed an essential legacy to modern culture. As Thoreau so shrewdly observed whilst at Walden Pond, whilst society is in ‘great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas’, it may turn out that ‘Maine and Texas […] have nothing important to communicate’ (W, p. 364). Thus, in an era of unprecedented global communication and public announcements on social media, both thinkers continue to remind us that the ‘infinitude of the private man’ (JMN, VII:342) often refuses to be translated into language. Emerson and Thoreau thus urge us to humbly accept our daily experiences of the ineffable as an irrefutable fact of our divinely inspired existence, to which one must finally lend only a ‘silent ear’ (AW, p. 226).

​

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