The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th century
rationalism and a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend
of 19th century thought. The movement was based on a fundamental
belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each
individual was thought to be identical with the world -- a
microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self- reliance and
individualism developed through the belief in the identification of
the individual soul with God.
Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a small
New England village 32 kilometers west of Boston. Concord was the
first inland settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town close
enough to Boston's lectures, bookstores, and colleges to be
intensely cultivated, but far enough away to be serene. Concord was
the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, and Ralph
Waldo Emerson's poem commemorating the battle, "Concord Hymn," has
one of the most famous opening stanzas in American literature:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood Their flag to April's
breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired
the shot heard round the world.
Concord was the first rural artist's colony, and the first place to
offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism.
It was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living
(Emerson and Henry David Thoreau both had vegetable gardens).
Emerson, who moved to Concord in 1834, and Thoreau are most closely
associated with the town, but the locale also attracted the
novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the feminist writer Margaret Fuller,
the educator (and father of novelist Louisa May Alcott) Bronson
Alcott, and the poet William Ellery Channing. The Transcendental
Club was loosely organized in 1836 and included, at various times,
Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson Alcott, Orestes
Brownson (a leading minister), Theodore Parker (abolitionist and
minister), and others.
The Transcendentalists published a quarterly magazine, The Dial,
which lasted four years and was first edited by Margaret Fuller and
later by Emerson. Reform efforts engaged them as well as
literature. A number of Transcendentalists were abolitionists, and
some were involved in experimental utopian communities such as
nearby Brook Farm (described in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance)
and Fruitlands.
Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a
manifesto. They insisted on individual differences -- on the unique
viewpoint of the individual. American Transcendental Romantics
pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers often
saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention.
The American hero -- like Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, or Mark
Twain's Huck Finn, or Edgar Allan Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym --
typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit
of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic American writer,
nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, far from
being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to
discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice -- all at
the same time. It is clear from the many masterpieces produced in
the three decades before the U.S. Civil War (1861-65) that American
writers rose to the challenge.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a
religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting
Christianity, he explained that, for him "to be a good minister, it
was necessary to leave the church." The address he delivered in
1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him
unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years. In it, Emerson accused the
church of acting "as if God were dead" and of emphasizing dogma
while stifling the spirit.
Emerson's philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true
that he consciously avoided building a logical intellectual system
because such a rational system would have negated his Romantic
belief in intuition and flexibility. In his essay "Self-Reliance,"
Emerson remarks: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds." Yet he is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth
of American individualism inspired by nature. Most of his major
ideas -- the need for a new national vision, the use of personal
experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of
compensation -- are suggested in his first publication, Nature
(1836). This essay opens:
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.
It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing
generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their
eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the
universe? Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of
tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history
of theirs. Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life
stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they
supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among
the dry bones of the past...? The sun shines today also. There is
more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new
thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Emerson loved the aphoristic genius of the 16th-century French
essayist Montaigne, and he once told Bronson Alcott that he wanted
to write a book like Montaigne's, "full of fun, poetry, business,
divinity, philosophy, anecdotes, smut." He complained that Alcott's
abstract style omitted "the light that shines on a man's hat, in a
child's spoon."
Spiritual vision and practical, aphoristic expression make Emerson
exhilarating; one of the Concord Transcendentalists aptly compared
listening to him with "going to heaven in a swing." Much of his
spiritual insight comes from his readings in Eastern religion,
especially Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. For example,
his poem "Brahma" relies on Hindu sources to assert a cosmic order
beyond the limited perception of mortals:
If the red slayer think he slay Or the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn
again.
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, And I the hymn the Brahmin
sings
The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred
Seven, But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back
on heaven.
This poem, published in the first number of the Atlantic Monthly
magazine (1857), confused readers unfamiliar with Brahma, the
highest Hindu god, the eternal and infinite soul of the universe.
Emerson had this advice for his readers: "Tell them to say Jehovah
instead of Brahma."
The British critic Matthew Arnold said the most important writings
in English in the 19th century had been Wordsworth's poems and
Emerson's essays. A great prose-poet, Emerson influenced a long
line of American poets, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson,
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Robert
Frost. He is also credited with influencing the philosophies of
John Dewey, George Santayana, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William
James.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Henry David Thoreau, of French and Scottish descent, was born in
Concord and made it his permanent home. From a poor family, like
Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard.
Throughout his life, he
reduced his needs to the simplest level and managed to live on very
little money, thus maintaining his independence. In essence, he
made living his career. A nonconformist, he attempted to live his
life at all times according to his rigorous principles. This
attempt was the subject of many of his writings.
Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), is the
result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847)
he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on property
owned by Emerson. In Walden, Thoreau consciously shapes this time
into one year, and the book is carefully constructed so the seasons
are subtly evoked in order. The book also is organized so that the
simplest earthly concerns come first (in the section called
"Economy," he describes the expenses of building a cabin); by the
ending, the book has progressed to meditations on the stars.
In Walden, Thoreau, a lover of travel books and the author of
several, gives us an anti-travel book that paradoxically opens the
inner frontier of self-discovery as no American book had up to this
time. As deceptively modest as Thoreau's ascetic life, it is no
less than a guide to living the classical ideal of the good life.
Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay challenges the
reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. The
building of the cabin, described in great detail, is a concrete
metaphor for the careful building of a soul. In his journal for
January 30, 1852, Thoreau explains his preference for living rooted
in one place: "I am afraid to travel much or to famous places, lest
it might completely dissipate the mind."
Thoreau's method of retreat and concentration resembles Asian
meditation techniques. The resemblance is not accidental: like
Emerson and Whitman, he was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist
philosophy. His most treasured possession was his library of Asian
classics, which he shared with Emerson. His eclectic style draws on
Greek and Latin classics and is crystalline, punning, and as richly
metaphorical as the English metaphysical writers of the late
Renaissance.
In Walden, Thoreau not only tests the theories of
Transcendentalism, he re-enacts the collective American experience
of the 19th century: living on the frontier. Thoreau felt that his
contribution would be to renew a sense of the wilderness in
language. His journal has an undated entry from 1851:
English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake
Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton included,
breathes no quite fresh and in this sense, wild strain. It is an
essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and
Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wildman a Robin Hood.
There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but not so
much of nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild
animals, but not the wildman in her, became extinct. There was need
of America.
Walden inspired William Butler Yeats, a passionate Irish
nationalist, to write "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," while Thoreau's
essay "Civil Disobedience," with its theory of passive resistance
based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey
unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi's Indian
independence movement and Martin Luther King's struggle for black
Americans' civil rights in the 20th century.
Thoreau is the most attractive of the Transcendentalists today
because of his ecological consciousness, do-it-yourself
independence, ethical commitment to abolitionism, and political
theory of civil disobedience and peaceful resistance. His ideas are
still fresh, and his incisive poetic style and habit of close
observation are still modern.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Born on Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman was a part-time
carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work
expressed the country's democratic spirit. Whitman was largely
self-taught; he left school at the age of 11 to go to work, missing
the sort of traditional education that made most American authors
respectful imitators of the English. His Leaves of Grass (1855),
which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains "Song of
Myself," the most stunningly original poem ever written by an
American. The enthusiastic praise that Emerson and a few others
heaped on this daring volume confirmed Whitman in his poetic
vocation, although the book was not a popular success.
A visionary book celebrating all creation, Leaves of Grass was
inspired largely by Emerson's writings, especially his essay "The
Poet," which predicted a robust, open-hearted, universal kind of
poet uncannily like Whitman himself. The poem's innovative,
unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant
democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the
poet's self was one with the poem, the universe, and the reader
permanently altered the course of American poetry.
Leaves of Grass is as vast, energetic, and natural as the American
continent; it was the epic generations of American critics had been
calling for, although they did not recognize it. Movement ripples
through "Song of Myself" like restless music:
My ties and ballasts leave me... I skirt sierras, my palms cover
continents I am afoot with my vision.
The poem bulges with myriad concrete sights and sounds. Whitman's
birds are not the conventional "winged spirits" of poetry. His
"yellow-crown'd heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and
feeds upon small crabs." Whitman seems to project himself into
everything that he sees or imagines. He is mass man, "Voyaging to
every port to dicker and adventure, / Hurrying with the modern
crowd as eager and fickle as any." But he is equally the suffering
individual, "The mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with
dry wood, her children gazing on....I am the hounded slave, I wince
at the bite of the dogs....I am the mash'd fireman with breast-bone
broken...."
More than any other writer, Whitman invented the myth of democratic
America. "The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth
have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States is
essentially the greatest poem." When Whitman wrote this, he
daringly turned upside down the general opinion that America was
too brash and new to be poetic. He invented a timeless America of
the free imagination, peopled with pioneering spirits of all
nations. D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist and poet, accurately
called him the poet of the "open road."
Whitman's greatness is visible in many of his poems, among them
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,"
and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," a moving elegy on
the death of Abraham Lincoln. Another important work is his long
essay "Democratic Vistas" (1871), written during the unrestrained
materialism of industrialism's "Gilded Age." In this essay, Whitman
justly criticizes America for its "mighty, many-threaded wealth and
industry" that mask an underlying "dry and flat Sahara" of soul. He
calls for a new kind of literature to revive the American
population ("Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing,
but the reader of the book does"). Yet ultimately, Whitman's main
claim to immortality lies in "Song of Myself." Here he places the
Romantic self at the center of the consciousness of the poem:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall
assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Whitman's voice electrifies even modern readers with his
proclamation of the unity and vital force of all creation. He was
enormously innovative. From him spring the poem as autobiography,
the American Everyman as bard, the reader as creator, and the
still-contemporary discovery of "experimental," or organic, form.
TRANSCENDENTALISM
219
0
9 минут
Понравилась работу? Лайкни ее и оставь свой комментарий!
Для автора это очень важно, это стимулирует его на новое творчество!