In “The Transcendentalist” (1841) Emerson writes that the transcendentalist “believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy” (Emerson 1996, p. 196). But what is the source of that miracle? Nearly all of them originally Unitarian Christians and some still claiming that identity, these radicals had already come a great distance from historic Christianity. For them, the only god we know for certain lives in each person, for whom visionary experiences can exceed our ordinary lives and become vehicles for recognizing and expressing the divinity within.
How are those experiences to be expressed? In what language, through what tropes, allusions, frames of reference? For many transcendentalist poets and those who followed in their wake, the biblical narratives expressed in beliefs, practices, and art were no longer compelling, or at least no longer singular. Like their British Romantic counterparts, transcendentalists sought a language to express evanescent “border” experiences as fully human rather than supernaturally induced, experiences that are transfiguring and may just as quickly fade (Abrams 1971).
The triumphs and pathos of “the aboriginal Self,” as Emerson called it in “Self-Reliance,” constitute one important thread in transcendentalism’s poetic legacy. There is, however, another thread, less visible in transcendentalism’s historical moment but increasingly visible in our time. This effort deliberately seeks to diminish the human voice, to decenter the human center of gravity. Here the restlessness of transcendentalists who moved from reform to reform manifested itself in efforts to see in nature not correspondence to the human story but its own independent life, and to find, paradoxically, human language to express that life. Thoreau’s work from Walden (1854) to his last essays and journal entries are the central texts in this version of transcendentalism. Few in his lifetime grasped the implications of his writing, but important modern and contemporary poets and critics have recovered his work as resources for their own.
The ante-bellum United States was awash in poetry, and poets associated with transcendentalism contributed to that flood-tide. Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune was a favorite newspaper outlet for these writers, but many more published in the transcendentalist journal The Dial (1840–1844) and in The Una (1853–1855), the first US women’s rights newspaper. Many of those contributors were women, including Margaret Fuller, Caroline Sturgis, and Ellen Sturgis Hooper. Fully one-third of the poems in the first issue of The Dial and nearly all the poems in the second issue were written by women. Between 1835 and 1844, the years of her greatest involvement in the transcendentalist movement, Margaret Fuller wrote over 100 poems, most of which were published in her lifetime (Kohler 2017, p. 142). Combined with poems written by men like Christopher Cranch, Jones Very, Ellery Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, and others, poetry was clearly a familiar vehicle for the transcendentalist coterie.
Emerson was often unimpressed with the work of his fellow poets. Jones Very, Greek tutor at Harvard, wrote sonnets that Emerson at first praised, but then found overwrought and unconvincing. A similar pattern of initial encouragement followed by disappointment marked Emerson’s views of Thoreau’s, Channing’s, and Charles King Newcomb’s verse, while Cranch’s poetry seemed barely worth considering by him (Moss 1976, pp. 49–59). Part of the difficulty lay in Emerson’s elevated sense of what a poet should be and do. In “The Poet,” he calls for “a liberating god” who is “a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents…but of the true poet.” Few, it seemed to Emerson, could live up to such standards (Emerson 1996, pp. 462, 466).
Several recent critics share Emerson’s skeptical views of the poetry written by his fellow transcendentalists. In an influential essay in The Columbia History of American Poetry, Lawrence Buell argues that transcendentalist poetry is marked by a “rhetoric of cerebral rather than visceral intensity committed to filtering represented experience through the lens of philosophic or moral reflection” (Buell 1993, pp. 116, 119). Stephen Cushman builds on Buell’s insight by proposing that the flight from the personal in much transcendentalist poetry stems, ironically, from the very Christian doctrine of self-denial that the movement critiqued (Cushman 2011, pp. 91–92). Or perhaps, as Ed Folsom has suggested, adherence to poetic tradition offered one place for the radicals to be safely grounded in Victorian gentility (Folsom 2010, p. 268).
Looked at differently, and less overshadowed either by Emerson’s dicta in “The Poet” or by Whitman’s and Dickinson’s subsequent achievements, transcendentalist-era poets did produce abundant, interesting, and often memorable work. For many of these writers, the two persistent issues were finding a distinctive poetic voice and finding fresh language for expressing spiritual or visionary experiences. As outlets for women poets expanded in the mid-nineteenth century, it is not incidental, therefore, that so many women writers associated with transcendentalism should write poetry, nor is it surprising that such poetry dealt with such themes.
Here, for example, is Margaret Fuller’s “Double Triangle, Serpent and Rays”:
Patient serpent, circle round,
Till in death thy life is found;
Double form of godly prime
Holding the whole thought of time,
When the perfect two embrace,
Male & female, black & white,
Soul is justified in space,
Dark made fruitful by the light;
And, centred in the diamond Sun,
Time & Eternity are one.
(Fuller 1998, p. 60)
Here Fuller confirms transcendentalists’ fascination with images of circles and orbs, but pushes further. Within a verbal representation of the ouroboros, the Egyptian and Greek image of the snake swallowing its tail, she embeds two triangles with their prime-number sides, and around all that she radiates the rays of the “diamond Sun.” The poem suggests the transcendentalist desire to go beyond accepted binaries in society and culture and to find non-Christian images of eternal life and sacred wisdom. It also likely springs from Fuller’s desire to acknowledge in her own life a complex identity that could not be reduced to easy dichotomies.
A second example of transcendentalist-era poetry is drawn from Unitarian clergyman Frederic Henry Hedge’s “Questionings,” published in the first number of The Dial:
Now I close my eyes, my ears,
And creation disappears;
Yet if I but speak the word,
All creation is restored.
Or—more wonderful—within,
New creations do begin;
Hues more bright and forms more rare,
Than reality doth wear,
Flash across my inward sense,
Born of the mind’s omnipotence.
(Hedge 2000, p. 523)
While Hedge resisted the anti-clerical attitudes of transcendentalists like Emerson and Bronson Alcott, his intellectual affinity for the movement is evident here. Hedge’s poem takes up the same issues as Emerson explores in Nature and “Self-Reliance”: to what extent does the phenomenal world exist apart from human perception of it? Or, pushing the question even further: does the mind create an inward world that is far richer and more varied than anything perceived to be external to it?
Meanwhile, in New York City, journalist, printer, and carpenter contractor Walter Whitman, Jr., spent much of the decade between 1845 and 1855 soaking up his city’s theater and opera performances and reading voraciously. A vast, undisciplined reader, clipper, and saver, Whitman returned