When we call to mind the word “transcendentalism,” we generate images of transparent eyeballs, Walden Pond, and perhaps the well-known profile of the elder Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet these simulacra remain amorphous, and philosophically anomalous, when abstracted from the intertextual historicity in which they evolved. The connotations associated with the foregoing images are not limited to the 19^th Century American version of transcendentalism, but represent instead a progression of philosophical thought. This progression originated in the work of 18^th Century German author Immanuel Kant, and was later translated by the British Romantic writer Samuel T. Coleridge. Coleridge’s seminal interpretations of Kant were those that were most widely ready by his contemporaries William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, as well as the primary progenitor of American transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although Kant’s ideas about how we generate knowledge greatly appealed to these authors, they contend that he should have continued to transcend his strictly cognitive conceptions, and integrate the sensual and emotional dimensions of the intellect. Coleridge reminds us that philosophy is, after all: “…an affectionate seeking after the truth” (BL, IX 228). Inspired by Coleridge’s revision of Kant’s theory, as well as the interpretive incarnations thereof generated by Wordsworth and Carlyle, Emerson himself translated “transcendentalism” into a uniquely American way of thinking, and being characterized quite literally by enthusiasm. In this paper, we will explore the contextual evolution of philosophical and literary “transcendentalism” that culminates in Emerson’s work.

In Emerson’s 1842 essay The Transcendentalist, he claims: “It is well known, that the Idealism of the present day acquired the name of Transcendental, from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg” (Atkinson, RWE 86). Kant’s interest for Romantics like Coleridge, and Emerson via Coleridge, lay in his articulation of a synthetic way of knowing that effectively transcended, literally went beyond, the problems posed by Cartesian dualism. The dispute the Romantics had with Descartes' theory of dualism was its insistence on the inherent separation between mind and body. This is to say, intelligence was limited to the realm of the soul; the body was limited to mere matter. Kant attempted to transcend this duality in his synthesis of a priori knowledge, this being knowledge that precedes experience, and intuition, or empirically derived facts. In her article Kant on Self-Consciousness, Patricia Kitcher cites Kant’s definition of “transcendental” to clarify its relation to a priori experience:

Kant gave an especially clear account of ‘transcendental’ in the appendix to the Prolegomena: “the word transcendental…means not something that goes outside all experience, but what indeed precedes experience (a priori) even though it is destined to nothing more than exclusively make cognition from experience possible. (345)

Thus, in Kantian terms, “transcendental” refers to the analytic process alone. A priori knowledge then emerges in Kantian theory as a function of the subconscious that initiates cognitive processes. Via the process of analysis Kant claims:

…we gain a kind of real knowledge a priori, which progresses safely and usefully, it happens that our reason, without being aware of it, appropriates under that pretence propositions of a totally different character, adding to given concepts new and strange ones a priori, without knowing whence they come…(Wood, BWK 29; my emphasis)

Generating ideas “without knowing whence they come” sounds a bit mystical and romantic, but in the context of Kantian critique, intuition, and its contribution to processing knowledge, is limited exclusively to cognition. Concurrently, the function of the senses is limited to information gathering, and processing in the course of executing synthetical judgments. Kant will explain that synthetical judgments are expanding propositions that synthesize a priori knowledge with sensory data, or experience, and accordingly yield new thought by way of deduction. In Kant’s theory, the generation of a synthetical judgment is essentially a metaphysical deduction, and as such, is always a “going beyond.” By acknowledging the role of intuition in cognition, Kant has effectively transcended the problems of Cartesian dualism to synthesize a priori knowledge with empirical knowledge.

Still missing from Kant’s methodology, however, is an acknowledgement of the role of the truly visceral nature of human consciousness. I introduce the word ‘visceral’ here in its most literal sense of: “Affecting the viscera or bowels regarded as the seat of emotion; pertaining to, or touching deeply, inward feelings” (OED). Kant’s articulation of a priori knowledge as something that can be aided by intuition only acknowledges our visceral being as a medium for cognitive intuition. While we currently tend to think of intuitive knowledge as that which is perhaps mystically or viscerally generated; something akin to a “gut feeling,” Kant maintains that intuition is only possible in the presence of the concept, or object, that inspires it. Intuition is limited to the status of a factor in Kant’s logical equation of knowledge. It would be inconceivable for him to recognize the ‘emotional seat’ of our being generating synthetical judgments. Therefore, despite the great strides Kant makes in overcoming much of the skepticism that dominated Enlightenment thinkers, the remaining disconnect between the cognitive and visceral elements of intelligence was left to be recovered by Romantic thinkers and poets like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle, and later Emerson.

In Chapter IX of his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge enthusiastically remembers the initial impact Kant’s writing had on him:

…the clearness and evidence, of the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’; of the Judgment;

of the ‘Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy,’ and of his ‘Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason,’ took possession of me as with a giant’s hand. After fifteen years’ familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. (232)

Despite his admiration for Kant, as a poet Coleridge could not accept the self-imposed limits Kant placed on his ideas. He continues to reflect:

In spite, therefore of [Kant’s] own declarations, I could never believe, it was possible for him to have meant no more by his Noumenon, or thing in itself, than his mere words express; or that in his own conception he confined the whole plastic power to the forms of the intellect, leaving for the external cause, for the materiale [stuff] of our sensations, a matter without form, which is doubtless inconceivable. (233)

Coleridge appears to feel that Kant should have continued to transcend his strictly cognitive conceptions and embrace the sensuous and emotional dimensions of the intellect. After reminding us that philosophy is “…an affectionate seeking after the truth,” he adds: “…but truth is correlative to being.” (228) Despite being the most influential British interpreter of Kantian transcendentalism of his time, Coleridge felt strongly that we need to recognize how the comprehensive nature of our being plays a role in the generation of thought.

In his Aids to Reflection, Coleridge will state: “Life is the one universal soul, which, by virtue of the enlivening BREATH, and the informing WORD, all organized bodies have in common each after its kind.” (4) The “enlivening breath” inspires the “informing word,” and in the context of “one universal soul,” this sentence is representative of Coleridge’s scheme of inspired, or natural, knowledge. Further clarification emerges upon recognizing that the word ‘kind,’ both in this context, and as we will later see employed by Emerson, appears to be an allusion to an influential medieval text, Piers Plowman, attributed to William Langland. In the Piers allegory, “Kind” is repeatedly employed to represent the divine predication of the innate qualities, most often, qualities of the mind; or “natural knowledge.” ‘Kind’ also appears in Piers as emblematic of God’s creation of nature itself. It is important for modern readers to remember that ‘nature,’ or that which is ‘natural’ in the directly foregoing and following contexts is intrinsically divine. Thus, natural knowledge, as it emerges in this vein, is also divine in origin. Although the thinkers of the Enlightenment are religious, they would maintain that divine creation ends in the manifestation of rational man. Knowledge would therefore be a product of divinity by way of man, but is not itself of divine issue. The difference between the Enlightenment thinkers and the Romantics is that the latter view knowledge as the fruit of omnipresent divinity, varying in degrees, but not kind. This philosophical shift is illustrated decisively in Coleridge’s articulation of the nature of the poetic imagination. According to Coleridge, ‘Kind,’ and its accrual of divine significance, emerges as the progenitor of imagination itself.

Coleridge posits a hierarchical trine of imagination in which the primary imagination, the secondary imagination, and the Fancy are of the same kind, but differ in degree. He describes the primary imagination as “…the prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” The secondary is “…an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree…It is essentially vital.” (my emphasis) Fancy is something less than imagination, it is a “…mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by word choice” (BL 313). In a journal entry dated August 1, 1835, Emerson translated Coleridge’s theory into his own words:

The distinction of fancy & imagination seems to me a distinction in kind. The fancy aggregates; the Imagination animates. The Fancy takes the world as it stands & selects pleasing groups by apparent relations. The Imagination is Vision, regards the word as symbolical, sees all external objects as types and pierces the emblem for the real sense… (Gilman, SWRWE 30, my emphasis)

Coleridge’s preceding philosophy of the nature of imagination accrues significance given that he chose to contextualize it with Book V of Milton’s Paradise Lost. In light of the antecedent propositions, Milton’s poem creates a contextual framework from which to more effectively grasp the sentiment of Coleridge’s tiers of imagination.

The following lines are first invoked in Chapter X of the Biographia and later extended in Chapter XII:

…both life, and sense
Fancy, and understanding: whence the soul
Reason receives, and REASON is her being,
DISCURSIVE or INTUITIVE. Discourse
Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,
Differing in degree, in kind the same. (Milton, Paradise Lost, Book V, 485-490)

The emphases here are Coleridge’s, and serve to actively recover the spiritual dimension of reasoning in a Romantic context. Given that Emerson appears to have echoed Milton’s syntax of ‘degree/distinction in kind’ in his interpretation of Coleridge’s theory, it is important to reflect on the intertextual implications. In the foregoing lines, we should first observe that the Soul receives Reason. Kant would argue that reason only receives a priori knowledge. However by replacing the a priori conception with the Soul, Coleridge revises the foundation of Kant’s entire argument: the soul both affects and effects reason. The divine aspect of our being emerges as essentially rational: “differing in degree, in kind the same.” In the context of Milton’s poem, we hear reverberations of the accrual of divine symbolism associated with kind which helps us understand how Coleridge’s trine of imagination carries with it different degrees of divinity.

Emerson will again recall the difference in ‘degree’ of ‘kind’ in The Transcendentalist, published in 1842. In this essay he claims that those who are called transcendentalists are accused of being too withdrawn from society. He explains that they maintain their distance because: “Their quarrel with every man they meet is not with his kind, but with his degree. There is not enough of him” (Atkinson, RWE 88). When we reflect on this statement in the foregoing context, the suggestion Emerson is making takes shape. We now recognize that when a ‘Transcendentalist’ says that there is not enough of a man, he means that he is lacking in degrees of spiritual awareness and understanding.

For both Coleridge and Emerson, arguably Milton also, he who is possessed of “enough” is the Poet. Coleridge’s allusion to Milton, a poet, is not accidental. It reinforces the position of the poet as he who has access to the primary imagination, the form of imagination most divine. This is precisely to what Emerson refers when he states in The Poet: “Poets are liberating Gods…we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode or in an action or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought” (Atkinson, RWE 302). The poet’s privilege is that he has the ability to transcend diurnal life to reveal the divine nature of humanity. Thus, poetic creativity emerges as a revelation of an individual’s engagement with divinity.

An allusion to the book of Revelation in the Bible is always at play among these writers; this allusion carries weight in the remembrance that both Coleridge and Emerson were ministers at earlier stages in their careers. In the book of Revelation, Jesus instructs John to: “Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter” (Rev. I.19). Emerson will take this imperative instruction most seriously. In a journal entry dated July-October 1831, he writes:

I write the things that are
Not what appears;
Of things as they are in the eye of God
Not in the eye of Man. (Gilman, SWRE 15)

Both imperative and inspired, these lines from Emerson’s journal effect a powerful echo of the book of Revelation. Coleridge will also pick up the rhetoric of revelation at the close of his preface to Aids to Reflection:

READER…[the Book of] Revelation has provided for you new subjects for reflection, and new treasures of knowledge, never to be unlocked by him who remains self-ignorant. Self-knowledge is the key to this casket; and by reflection alone can it be obtained...For if words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined and humanized. (xix)

Thus, what is essentially to be ‘revealed’ is self-knowledge, and this “casket” may be opened via the interpretive methodology of self-reflection.

In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge’s contemporary, William Wordsworth, describes poetic revelation as “…a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” but “…it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” (Wu, R 263) A pause between clauses is important because, at least in my experience, students and readers feel an urge to claim one or the other as a process they identify with, but again, it is only in the tranquil reflection of previously heightened emotion that transcendental revelation is possible. Wordsworth continues to emphasize reflection in a way that most certainly appealed to Emerson:

The emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins… (263)

A poetic manifestation of the Wordsworthian self-reflective hermeneutic takes shape beautifully in his poem Lines Written a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey:

While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things. (48-50, my emphasis)

According to his journals, this was one of Emerson’s favorite poems by Wordsworth; it was among the first listed in an imaginary compendium of his work that he included in his journal on May 25, 1837. I can only imagine his enthusiasm upon reading the line: we see into the life of things! This poetic epiphany is emblematic of the nature of the etymological roots of enthusiasm itself. From the Greek, enthusiasm signifies: “the fact of being possessed by a god,” connotations extend to “poetical fervor” and “fancied inspiration” (OED). That the poet, by virtue of his being, reveals “…the life of things” recalls the divine power Emerson incarnates in his claim that “Poets are liberating Gods.” This sentiment is echoed in Emerson’s emblematic employment of his famous “transparent eyeball” in Nature, the first published of his essays in 1836:

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 eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. (Atkinson, RWE 6)

These lines represent a poetic vision that inspired the revelation of the author’s understanding of his place of self-in-the-world while they simultaneously inspire his readers to attempt the same. It should be observed that the phrase ‘all mean egotism vanishes’ has become contentious in certain circles. Some like to claim that Emerson’s ego transcends into conceit, but that is to miss the essence of the foregoing statement. Outside of personality squabbles, the self-centered nature of Emerson’s work is absolutely consistent with his philosophy. Thus, the phrase “all mean egotism vanishes” is itself a reflective recognition of self-knowledge; in a moment of epiphany, the divine universe revealed itself to him as of himself.

Self-knowledge is not to be confused with self-consciousness. We are still working from a translation of Kant’s syllogism by which the generation of intuitive knowledge is the unconscious synthesis of a priori knowledge and sensual knowledge; propositions and judgments can be formed from this intuitive capacity. Coleridge, Wordsworth and Emerson will all translate a Kantian vision of synthetic a priori knowledge as an unconscious form of divine, or poetic, knowledge. That we are unconscious of the process of divine inspiration, and may measure such only by the effects of subliminal action as they are revealed to us is taken up by the Scottish-born Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle was an author in whom Emerson found his passion for the study of human nature vigorously reflected. In a journal entry dated October 1, 1832, Emerson writes: “I am cheered and instructed by this paper on Corn Law Rhymes [part of Carlyle’s Characteristics] in the Edinburgh by my Germanick new-light writer whoever he be…Blessed art that makes books, and so joins me to that stranger by this perfect railroad” (Perry, HEJ 59). Little did Emerson know at the time, but the then-anonymous Carlyle will later become one of his greatest friends and influences.

In Carlyle’s satirical essay Characteristics, Emerson found similar sentiments to his own, voiced imperiously. It is in this work that Carlyle expresses elements of the Romantic version of Kantian synthetic judgment in the rhetoric of consciousness:

Of our Thinking, we might say, it is but the mere upper surface that we shape into articulate Thoughts; - underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation; here, in its quiet mysterious depths, dwells what vital force is in us; here, if aught is to be created, and not merely manufactured and communicated, must work go on. (C&M 297)

It is important not to read unconsciousness through what has become a habitual lens of modern psychology, but as that which is a priori in Kantian terms, or the realm of divinity in man, according to the Romantics. Carlyle will maintain that the unconscious generates Creation, and is, via inward reflection, revealed to the conscious self through subliminal inspiration. Ergo, when one consciously strives to achieve revelation, it will only be a manufactured version. As we see in a journal entry dated September 8, 1840, Emerson once experienced this problem first hand:

I went into the woods. I found myself not wholly present there. If I looked at a pine-tree or an aster, that did not seem to be Nature. Nature was still elsewhere: this, or this was but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the triumph that passed by…Always the present object gave me this sense of stillness that follows a pageant that has just gone by. (HEJ 155)

In going for a walk in the woods with the conscious intention of observing “Nature,” Emerson was unable to experience the divinity of Nature that is so often a source of inspiration. Inspiration literally means “to breathe,” and is figuratively employed in the sense of breathing life into an individual (OED). The path of inspiration is one which first awakens the senses which, in turn, have the potential to effect moments of poetic genius. Although we can synthesize the effects of inspiration through conscious cognition, inspiration in itself is not an inherently conscious process.

Carlyle will expand on his reflections regarding the unconscious revelation of self-knowledge in his satirical allegory Sartor Resartus. This novel is a translation not only of Professor Teufelsdrock’s philosophy of clothes, but is also a version of intertextual revelation itself. In Sartor, Carlyle writes a treatise on textiles in order to explore the fabric, or “grand Tissue” of human existence:

How then, comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, should have been quite overlooked by Science – the vestural Tissue, namely of woolen or other cloth; which Man’s Soul wears as its outmost wrappage and overall; wherein his whole Faculties work, his whole Self lives, moves and has its being? (4)

Carlyle’s syntax is deceptively simple in light of the symbolic implications generated by his use of the word ‘Tissue.’ ‘Tissue’ is a word with roots in textiles, it is that which is created by a process of weaving. The word has additional contextual associations with biology, or human tissue, and, of course, written text itself. In the primal context of Sartor, however, the concept of ‘Tissue’ suggests Langland’s version of ‘Kind,’ or: “God conceived primarily in his creative aspect” (Robertson, Shepard 630). That the ‘whole Self’ of man ‘lives’ in ‘Tissue’ helps us understand that, according to Carlyle, man is always inherently clothed in the context of his divinity, and is thus predicated. This idea that man is inherently clothed might at first appear paradoxical; it is more natural to think that man’s most pure state would be a kind of pre-lapsarian nakedness. Carlyle, however, begs to differ:

Some straggling broken-winged thinker…regarding Clothes as property, not an accident, as quite natural and spontaneous, like the leaves of trees, like the plumage of birds. (SR 4)

Emerson will metaphorically translate Carlyle’s claim that man is predicated by clothing in The Transcendentalist: “I, this thought which is called I, am the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould” (Atkinson, RWE 84). The world is then our ‘clothing,’ or that which predicates our ‘mould.’ In this context, the adage “the clothes make the man” accrues divine significance.

Reflecting on the foregoing maxim in context with Sartor’s rhetorical clothing is interesting. In form, Sartor remains revolutionary – it literally twists and turns the reader through a maze of philosophical, satirical, and allegorical reflections of morality. The overarching effect is a multidimensional echo of the book of Revelation. Mixing metaphors to describe the form of Sartor somehow feels appropriate because any understanding to be gleaned from this text emerges as a semi-conscious reflection of its genius. Emerson is probably the most enthusiastic proponent of this work, it was he who took the lead to collate the installments that had appeared in Fraser’s and arrange for publication in book form in America. Despite Emerson’s passion for Sartor however, even he doesn’t grasp the totality of the multiple layers of signification in the text. In his first letter to Carlyle, dated May 14, 1834, Emerson expresses his perplexity regarding the author’s choice of form:

But has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure. [sic] I delight in the contents, the form which my defective apprehension of a joke makes me not appreciate I leave to your merry discretion. And yet did ever wise & philanthropic author use so defying a diction? As if society were not sufficiently shy of truth without providing it before hand with an objection to the form…At least in some of your prefaces you should give us the theory of your rhetoric. (Corr. E-C 98-99)

Although Emerson’s criticism of Sartor is perfectly fair, it is at odds with the great admiration he had for the work, and by the end of his letter, it was the latter which prevails:

I have now received four numbers of the Sartor Resartus for whose light, thanks evermore. I am glad that one living scholar is self-centered & will be true to himself though none ever were before… …And yet before I come to the end of my letter I may repent of my temerity & unsay my charge. For are not all our circlets of will as so many little eddies rounded in by the great circle of Necessity and could the Truth-Speaker perhaps now the best Thinker of the Saxon race have written otherwise? And must not we say that Drunkenness is a virtue rather than that Cato had erred? (99-100)

Ironically, in the last five lines, Emerson writes in a style remarkably similar to that which he has criticized. Although Emerson often employs rhetorical questions, complex literary allusions and symbolic puns, the use of capitalization in the foregoing excerpt and the sheer density of rhetorical devices appear to echo Carlyle’s style in Sartor itself. Given Emerson’s strong aversion to ‘imitation,’ I argue that this rhetorical homage is itself an unconscious translation of the essence of Carlyle’s work that inspired him to embrace the work so enthusiastically.

In contemplating Emerson’s ideas in the context from which they were generated, we may now explore how he effectively synthesizes Kant’s idea of the transcendental nature of a priori knowledge with Coleridge’s theories of the imagination, Wordsworth’s reflective methodology, as well as Carlyle’s emphasis on revelation via the unconscious, to translate these concepts and practices as enthusiasm. For Emerson, enthusiasm is revelation. In his essay The Oversoul we can see how he translates the synthesis of the affective and cognitive powers of the intellect to reveal truth:

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth…We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime…A thrill passes through all men at the reception of a new truth, or at the performance of a great action which comes out of the heart of nature…The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration…to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion…(which) makes society possible. (Gilman, SWRWE 301-302; my emphasis)

In order to apprehend ‘new truth’ per Emerson, we must transcend our humanity in order to generate knowledge. Some might contend that in the bounds of Emerson’s claim that we are always “part and parcel” of God, nothing need transcend, but in this ordinary state our being is only capable of reasoning via association, or engaging in flights of Coleridgean fancy. In the context of Emerson’s work, the imaginative vision one needs in order to reveal truth, to be a poet, is generated by enthusiasm. Emerson captures the essence of this process in his essay The Poet:

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or “with the flower of the mind;” not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service… (Atkinson, RWE 339)

Enthusiasm is essentially ‘wild;’ an active way of being in our natural state. Emerson’s version of enthusiasm emerges also as a reflection of the tenets of American being itself. Throughout our history, Americans have been determined to be self-determined. It should be acknowledged, however, that among the 19^th Century intellectual community there remained an inherent tension between feelings of superiority and inferiority in comparison to our European predecessors. Our achievements in the realm of democracy and liberty generated a degree of arrogance early on, but this has always been tempered by the fact that the bulk of our influences are European in nature. 19^th Century American authors were self-conscious about their primary dependence on Europe for literary culture and strove actively to create traditions they would call their own.

In his essay The American Scholar, Emerson illustrates a cultural shift in progress: “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close” (Gilman, SWRWE 225). By this he does not mean that we should no longer read books of European descent, but that we must read with care: “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use?...They are for nothing but to inspire” (230). Emerson will go on to say that the ‘best’ books transcend time so that we may reflect on them the context of our universal divinity to very literally become inspired.

In inspiration we find the source of both enthusiasm and revelation. Revelation for Emerson is always a divine self-revelation, and in the act of recognizing, respecting and acting on this knowledge, we are self-reliant. Self-Reliance is perhaps Emerson’s most popular essay in America today, and it is certainly among the most representative of the tenets of a national American identity. These oft quoted lines are just a few of the many gems in this essay that reflect what was then, and remains now, a uniquely American ideal:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that his which he can do nor does he know until he has tried. (Gilman, SWRWE 267)

Emerson has translated his influences in the foregoing lines to describe his unique version of the American ideal. His claim that “imitation is suicide” is not a call for a kind of American tabula rasa, but rather an appeal for reflective interpretation. As George Steiner reminds us in his book After Babel: “The import, of meaning and of form, the embodiment, is not made in or into a vacuum” (298). The effect of exploring Emerson’s version of transcendentalism an intertextual perspective is to recognize that, in his translation of ideas presented in the writings of Kant, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle, he effectively transcends transcendentalism. His going beyond of his influences is not limited to thematic content, but extends to the manner in which the rhetorical imperatives in his writing demands that his readers – friends and countrymen alike - aspire to maintain a kind of perennial transcendence. The natural metaphor ‘perennial’ does not suggest perfection, nor an unattainable ideal, but is rather like a bulb planted that germinates through fall and winter to bloom in the spring, and thrive or not before withering into another quiet state of hibernation. This natural cycle of perennial agriculture illustrates the concept reflected in Emerson’s poet: speaking with the “flower of the mind.”

“Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say ‘It is in me, and shall out.’” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet

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