The American Scholar: Emerson’s Call to Awaken American Thought
In late June 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson was asked by the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society to address their annual meeting in August at the First Parish Meeting House in Cambridge. Emerson agreed and on August 31, 1837, he delivered “The American Scholar” to an impressive audience of theologians, writers, a Supreme Court Justice, and the president of Harvard. Emerson had graduated from Harvard University in 1821.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson utilized this opportunity to rail against the then-current approaches to higher education, which were still focused on repetitive teachings of the past, reliant on European writers and artists, and increasingly leaning towards the importance of financial gain and material goods. Emerson declared, “The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind…they look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.” (Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems, 88) He encouraged Americans to recognize their new intellectual opportunities and to end reliance on other cultures. He prophesied, “Perhaps the time is already come…when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.” (83)
Emerson wrote “The American Scholar” at a time when America was becoming industrialized, causing the importance of the individual to be lost over the focus on the institution. Education was viewed as the path to wealth and position and not creative thinking and self-trust. He commented, “Colleges…can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their young on flame.” (90)
Emerson stressed the importance of nature in developing creative and independent thinking. Original thought was natural and self-knowledge vital. He wrote, “The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature…every day, the sun; and after sunset, Night and her stars. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages” (85). He continued, “Its [nature’s] beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments…And, in fine, the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.” (86)
First Parish Meeting House in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He concluded his address by urging his audience to consider thought revolution as naturally American, “…this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar…thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” (101)
Emerson was experiencing significant change and taking on daring new opportunities in his own life, including challenging the American educational system and creation of ideas in “The American Scholar.” He had recently published his first important essay, “Nature,” in 1836, which was also the year his beloved brother Charles died and his son Waldo was born. Emerson had delivered “The American Scholar” at Henry David Thoreau’s graduation from Harvard (it is unclear if Thoreau was present) and subsequently they met.
On September 8, 1836, less than a month after “The American Scholar,” and the day before “Nature” was published, the Transcendental Club was formed by ministers, writers and educators who agreed with Emerson’s thoughts expressed in “The American Scholar.” The founding members—including Emerson—“found the present state of thought in America ‘very unsatisfactory’’ (Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 245). Emerson was an active member of the Transcendental Club until it disbanded in 1844.
Amidst all of the life and cultural changes, Emerson was embarking on his remarkable 40-year career as an essayist, poet and speaker. Driven to share his thoughts publicly, his mind was racing with new ideas designed to increase individual expression and promote the importance of nature to thought and literature. As biographer Robert D. Richardson so aptly wrote, his was a Mind on Fire.
Although the reaction to “The American Scholar” was somewhat mixed, Emerson published the talk at his own expense and all 500 copies were sold out within a month. Poet James Russell Lowell later reflected, “We were socially and intellectually moored to English thought till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of blue water” (266). Oliver Wendell Holmes later called Emerson’s speech “our Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” (263)
— B. Ewen, Emerson House guide
WORKS CITED:
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems. Bantam Books, 1990, pp. 83-102.
Richardson, Robert D. Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. University of California Press, 1995.
