Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!
(Dickinson 1961, p. 47)
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, transcendentalism’s reputation declined dramatically. Henry Adams’s 1876 review of O.B. Frothingham’s pioneering Transcendentalism in New England skewered its adherents as people who “sought conspicuous solitudes; looked out of windows and said, ‘I am raining’; clad themselves in strange garments; courted oppression; and were, in short, unutterably funny” (Adams 1876, pp. 470–471). Less humorous was George Santayana’s address in 1911 called “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy.” Santayana charged that transcendentalism contributed to a weak, self-centered, and self-conscious attitude among American intellectuals, unfitting them to engage in the world of conflict and desire (Santayana 1982, pp. 252–253).
As transcendentalism as a movement faded, its influence on the writing of poetry began to be located not so much in a shared impulse as in the work of individual writers. In this way, transcendentalism became a literary and cultural influence conveyed in texts, its collective identity condensed into the memorable writings of a handful of figures. According to several influential twentieth-century critics, poets Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and A.R. Ammons were heirs of Emerson and “Emersonian transcendentalism” (Bloom 1971a pp. 217–234, 1971b pp. 257–290, 1975, pp. 160–176; Poirier 1977, pp. 144–145, 187–188, 1987; Poirier 1992, pp. 68–69). For these and other critics, the work of philosopher William James became an additional lens through which to read the nineteenth-century writers, making Emerson and his version of transcendentalism a forerunner of pragmatism (Poirier 1987, pp. 13–36; Bauerlein 1997, pp. 7–35).
William James grew up in the shadow of transcendentalism, where William’s father Henry senior and Emerson were friends and friendly rivals. “Oh, you man without a handle!” Henry senior once charged. For his part, William disliked the way transcendentalists often lapsed into a vague belief in a universal spirit or “Oversoul,” as Emerson put it. That sounded too much like a comforting doctrine that explained, or explained away, everything. In 1903, preparing to lecture at a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Emerson’s birth, James took it upon himself to re-read nearly everything Emerson wrote, underlining and commenting as he went (Richardson 2006, pp. 432–34). That reading changed James’s mind about the Concord essayist.
What was most impressive, said James in his 1903 address, was Emerson’s emphasis on “the sovereignty of the living individual” (Richardson 2006, p. 435). James would find ample evidence in Emerson’s book Nature (1836), which proclaims that “the reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself…. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see” (Emerson 1998, pp. 47–48).
At the same time, Emerson understood that the self-confidence to “build therefore your own world” would inevitably be matched by a sense of human inadequacy. “Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow!” he wrote in “Circles.” “I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall” (Emerson 1996, p. 406). James, usually a self-confident thinker and writer, might hesitate to write such sentences. But he did acknowledge that insights can often best be expressed in hesitations and transitions: “We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold,” he wrote in “The Stream of Consciousness” (James 2000, p. 180).
For Emerson, the sense of human limitation often arose when he pondered the place of the self in the natural world. What are the affinities between the human and the more-than-human? For Emerson, nature sometimes appeared as the intractable “other” against which the human imagination struggled, and sometimes as a process of which humanity is an integral part (Branch and Mohs 2017, pp. 125, 204–205).
Reading Emerson reinforced for Robert Frost his decision to locate much of his poetry in rural settings, to explore the complex connections between the human and more-than-human worlds. At the same time, reading Emerson through James led Frost to find those connections unsettling and often deeply problematic. A nighttime snowstorm in “Desert Places” covers the ground and smothers the animals “in their lairs,” prompting an awareness of an inner loneliness, “A blanker whiteness of benighted snow/With no expression, nothing to express.” The poem continues:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places
(Frost 1961, pp. 194–195).
There are moments, the speaker suggests, when nature and the self are congruent, but only as a mutual emptiness. In “The Most of It” the speaker longs for an independent voice in nature, “Counter-love, original response.” Yet the poem suggests that what the speaker wants even more is someone, “someone else additional to him.” When that “additional” appeared as a huge buck crossing the lake and stumbling “through the rocks with horny tread,” the protagonist concluded “that was all” (Frost 1961, pp. 224–225). In this poem, the quest for an Emersonian “original relation with the universe” is thwarted by a failure of imagination, by a limited desire to see the world only as essentially human.
Frost offers a vision of just how difficult it is to work through that dialectic of self and not-self. In his most memorable poems, he seems to suggest the near-collapse of that effort, the lapse into silence and inanition: “My words are nearly always an offense./I don’t know how to speak of anything/So as to please you,” Amy’s husband cries out in “Home Burial” (Frost 1961, p. 43). Language is at best vague and slippery, its meaning forever eluding our grasp. Both James and Frost nod in agreement to Emerson’s lines in “Experience”: “dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads…” (Emerson 1990, p. 473).
No wonder critic Lionel Trilling called Frost “a terrifying poet…. The universe that he conceives is a terrifying universe… But whenever have people been so isolated, so lightning-blasted… so reduced, each in his way, to some last irreducible core of being [?] … The manifest America of Mr. Frost’s poems may be pastoral; the actual America is tragic” (Trilling 2000, pp. 378–379). Joanna Meadvin builds on that perspective: Frost is a modern transcendentalist, she says, swinging between materiality and ideality, but fully at home with darkness, danger, evil, and chaos (Meadvin 2010, pp. 112, 122).
The challenge of living in a world where meaning is invented rather than imparted is not simply one that Emerson or Frost confronted alone, but rather was the shared challenge of the transcendentalist group. In that sense, Wallace Stevens’s poetry joins in a long conversation that included those nineteenth-century figures. Stevens shapes that conversation in distinctive ways, but as Bart Eeckhout points out, his poetry typically circles around the same epistemological questions that troubled the transcendentalists: can we grasp the world as it “really” is, or do we know it only through the lens of the knower? (Eeckhout 2007, p. 109).
For Stevens, as for Emerson and Hedge before him, the self certainly can experience itself as world-creating. We see this in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in lines that are both very Romantic and transcendentalist:
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song,