WILLIAM BARNES, ALFRED LORD TENNYSON, RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect...
The lines from The Fall of Hyperion evoke Keats’s century, its disappointed political and social ideals. History proved autonomous of the human will: it would not succumb to prediction, logic or control, and even more brutally in the next century it proposed and then disproved the prophecies of Karl Marx. In the provinces, on a local scale, a few writers set out on heroically doomed ventures. In his “Dissertation on the Dorset Dialect of the English Language” (1844), William Barnes identifies with what he hopefully calls “that increasing class who wish to purify our tongue and enrich it from its own resources”—the resources of dialect. He swims hard against a tide in which “the spread of school education among the lower ranks of the people” (the fruit of an idealism) seems destined to erase the abundance of local usage and reduce the expressive resources of language. Barnes’s Dorset dialect, he believes, is the purest and most authentic in Britain, and one of the most expressive. He devotes his efforts to advocacy and exemplification, providing a varied and coherent dialect poetry. If he lacks the folk roots and molten libido of Burns, if he seems to be constructing a dialect poetry in the way that Hugh MacDiarmid was to do in Scotland less than a century later, it is not the hopeless enterprise we judge but the poetry. Hardy, Barnes’s devoted advocate, aligns him with Collins, Gray and Tennyson, rather than with “the old unpremeditating writers in dialect. Primarily spontaneous, he was academic closely after; and we find him warbling his native woodnotes with a watchful eye on the predetermined score, a far remove from the popular impression of him as the naïf and rude bard who sings only because he must.” Hopkins, too, in correspondence with Robert Bridges and Coventry Patmore, valued Barnes’s enterprise.
“To write in what some may deem a fast out-wearing speech-form,” says Barnes, using an entirely Anglo-Saxon diction, “may seem as idle as the writing of one’s name in snow on a spring day... [but]... I cannot help it. It is my mother tongue, and it is to my mind the only true speech of the life that I draw.” There is no useful point of comparison between Barnes and Burns. If Burns lacks repose, Barnes lacks urgency, extremes of feeling, flights of rhetoric, social and sexual abandon, satiric sting. Burns was a Scots poet in the tradition of Dunbar; Barnes, an English poet in the main tradition, who happened to write—or had to write—in dialect. He tends a narrower patch and ponders it at greater leisure—he lived to eighty-five. He is a wise poet, but a poet almost by chance. He wrote poems “as if I could not help it, the writing of them was not work but like the playing of music.” Few poets are as inextricably rooted in their place as he. Hopkins said: “Barnes is a perfect artist. It is as if Dorset life and Dorset landscape had taken flesh and blood in the man.” This is as true of the eclogues as of the lyrics and elegies. Hardy commented on this quality, the “closeness of phrase to vision.” “Come, Fanny, come! put on thy white, / ’Tis Woodcom’ feäst, good now! tonight.”
Barnes was born at Rush-Hay, Bagber Common, near Sturminster Newton, Dorset, in 1801. His father was a not very prosperous tenant farmer. When Barnes was five his mother died; he was sent to the Vale of Blackmore, where his aunt and uncle reared him. The rural life he evokes was a lived, not an artificial experience. A poem in “common,” or “national,” English tells of his early years:
We spent in woodland shades our day
In cheerful work or happy play,
And slept at night where rustling leaves
Threw moonlight shadows o’er our eaves.
I knew you young, and love you now,
O shining grass, and shady bough.
This nostalgic, conventional language does not get into the dialect poems, though the subtle prosody does. In “The Leäne” (“The Lane”)—one of his best poems—he contrasts was and is:
The poem considers the consequences of the enclosure of the common land.
The vicar and the schoolmaster took an interest in young Barnes. He learned Greek and Latin. When he was thirteen his uncle went bankrupt and Barnes became a solicitor’s clerk in Dorchester. When the solicitor who had furthered his education died, the eighteen-year-old Barnes moved to another clerkship. He progressed gradually. He met and decided to marry Julia Miles, and did so—nine years later. At the age of nineteen he printed Poetical Pieces, including a translation from the Greek of Bion. He became an engraver and at twenty-two was appointed headmaster of a school in Mere, Wiltshire. Ten years later he became a headmaster in Dorchester. He was a fine schoolmaster—original and erudite, adept at languages. His poems attest to a knowledge of classical, Persian (“Woak Hill”) and Welsh forms, among others. His Philological Grammar reveals him to be at least on nodding terms with more than sixty languages, which influenced his “principles and forms.” The Glossary of the Dorset Dialect (1844, 1863, 1886) was his most valuable contribution to philology and lexicography.
His first real collection, Poems of Rural Life, in the Dorset Dialect, with a dissertation and glossary, appeared in 1844. Further collections followed in 1846 and 1868—this last in “common English.” As well as poetry, he wrote books on mathematics, currency, social questions and archaeology. E. M. Forster criticizes his prose intelligence as “provincial.” He might equally have said rooted in community and language, and deeply learned. “Provincial,” in Barnes’s case, is not pejorative. If he pursues his intellectual program to purge English of Latinisms and to Saxonize it too far, it does not mar the verses.
He became a bachelor of divinity (Cambridge) after ten years’ study and was given his first curacy at Whitcombe, near Dorchester, in 1848. His wife’s death four years later occasioned some of his finest verse and began a decade of difficulty. Beyond the emotional was a practical bereavement: Julia managed his affairs, a task for which he had no talent. In 1862 he was given his first and only living, that of Winterbourne Came. He was again secure and remained so until his death in 1886. For twenty-four years he was an exemplary parson. Hardy knew him as the “aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak, knee-breeches, and buckled shoes”—the shoes are on display in Dorchester Museum today—“with a leather satchel slung over his shoulders, and a stout staff in his hand.” A “little grey dog” followed at his heels. Hardy memorialized Barnes in his fine poem “The Last Signal” and later edited and introduced a selection of his verse.
Barnes loved the lives around him. His anger at the enclosure of common land and the consequences for poor farmers (his own uncle was bankrupted) informs many pieces. In “The Common A-Took In,” an eclogue, Thomas and John exchange views on the common land. Thomas says,
’Tis handy to live near a common:
But I’ve a-zeed, an I’ve a-zaid,
That if a poor man got a bit o’ bread,
They’ll try to teäke it vrom en.
He suggests that “they” might rent out “bits o’ groun” that by rights belong to the poor: a further indignity.
The eclogue form that relies on dialogue appealed to Barnes because, as C. H. Sisson writes, “it suited his sense of the plurality of lives about him.” He catches variety of inflection, tone and character. He takes as model the Idylls of Theocritus in preference to Latin or English imitations. “The dialogue,” Sisson says, “is remarkable for being so ordinary. What other poet of mid-Victorian times has presented us with speakers of such solid actuality?” Meter and speech are matched. And, Sisson adds, “The resonances of the ancient speech carry with them more of the physical presence of the speaker, of the gestures and facial expressions and turns of mind and emotion. Speech is a physical thing, and poetry draws deeply upon the physical personality.” Among the best eclogues are “A Ghost,” “The Väiries,” “The Lotments” and “The Heäre.”
The dialect elegies for Julia speak of a particular grief but generalize the griever into a representative rural figure. To have spoken otherwise would have been, for Barnes, self-pity and in bad taste. Related poems of resignation at once celebrate and lament things lost. “The Happy Days when I were Young” and his last outstanding poem, “The Geäte a-vallen to” are in this mode.
In emphasizing dialect poems, we might overlook the English writing. There are moments of fine visualization: a rider records “My mare’s two ears’ white tips”; there’s the “ribby bark” of trees; nightfall, when “The mill stands dark beside the flouncing foam”; “A Winter Night” may have inspired some of Hardy’s Satires of Circumstance. Of the English poems, “Black and White” is among the best. Its metrical dexterity, internal rhyme and alliteration “in the Welsh manner,” and the modulated refrain (Barnes’s use of refrains is always masterly) place it on a par with Hardy’s best work and the best of Barnes’s dialect poetry. It reports on experience and celebrates:
At the end of the barton the granary stood,
Of black wood, with white geese at its side,
And the white-winged swans glided over the waves
By the cave’s darksome shadows in pride:
Oh! the black and the white! Which was fairest to view?
Why the white became fairest on you.
William Allingham remembers visiting Alfred, Lord Tennyson, when Barnes was also a guest. The two poets were immediately “on easy terms, having simple poetic minds and mutual good-will.” The talk was of “Ancient Britons, barrows, roads,” and during dinner they exchanged stories of “Ghosts and Dreams.” Afterward in the drawing room Tennyson took port, while Barnes declined to drink. They withdrew to Tennyson’s top room, where Darwinism raised its head. Tennyson expressed an aesthetic pantheism, and Barnes made his excuses and went to bed. Barnes, Tennyson surmised, was “not accustomed to strong views theologic.”
For Barnes, theology was a question of revealed truth, not of “strong views.” Tennyson was more a man of feeling than of ideas or beliefs. He could—and did—entertain possibilities; his poetry is diverse in invention, formal and thematic, and less of a coherent piece than Barnes’s, Hardy’s or Browning’s. It has a recurrent set of feelings and a recurrent kind of setting. In “An Ancient to Ancients” Thomas Hardy—a bit reductively—evokes it.
The bower we shrined to Tennyson
Gentlemen,
Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon
Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,
The spider is sole denizen;
Even she who voiced those rhymes is dust,
Gentlemen!
Tennyson’s settings and emotions could seem artificial and trumped up, just as for modern readers, after long infatuation, the concerns of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets can come to seem factitious. “Do you know, a horrible thing has happened to me,” Hopkins wrote to a friend in 1864. “I have begun to doubt Tennyson.” He began to doubt after reading Enoch Arden (1864). He found competent, interesting verse, but without the steady excitement of Tennyson’s earlier work. Hopkins chose the right time to record a doubt. Much of Tennyson’s weaker work dates from the last thirty years of his long life; and most of the strongest was written between 1830 and 1835.
Of his contemporaries, only Barnes enjoyed a longer working life than he did. Tennyson was first moved to verse at the age of five and began writing three years later when “I covered two sides of a slate with Thomsonian blank verse in praise of flowers.” Thomson was at the time the only poet he had read. A couple of years later Pope’s Iliad became his passion; he wrote “hundreds and hundreds of lines in regular Popeian metre, nay even could improvise them,” as could his brothers, to the delight of their poet father. He moved on to writing a 6,000-line epic in Scott’s octosyllables. Brevity and condensation were never his strong suit. “I wrote as much as seventy lines at one time, and used to go shouting them about the fields after dark.” His first poems appeared in book form when he was eighteen; his last poems, in the year of his death, 1892: sixty-five years of writing, and perhaps fifty of those with only Browning as a serious rival, and that not until the 1860s.
Tennyson built his huge poetic edifice on a narrow base. A wordsmith, he went for extension but was unable to sustain extended form; he did not master narrative but kept setting himself narrative challenges. He did not welcome criticism, except from his friend Arthur Hallam (1811–33), whose early death affected the course of his life and art.
Alfred Tennyson, later first Baron Tennyson, was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, in 1809, son of an aggressively melancholy country rector-versifier from whom he inherited temperamental gloominess and received an early education in the well-stocked rectory library. It was there that he and his brothers began to write. In 1827 he and his elder brother, the far from negligible but neglected Charles Tennyson Turner, issued Poems by Two Brothers. In 1828 Alfred went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met Hallam. To Hallam he paid attention. They discussed the nature of poetic language. In 1830 Poems Chiefly Lyrical was published and received hostile attention. Another book, Poems, followed in 1833. Hallam sent the first of these books to Leigh Hunt, who—having backed Keats, Shelley and Byron—set about “discovering” Tennyson: “We have seen no such poetical writing since the last volume of Mr Keats,” wrote Hunt. There was a flavor of Keats in the volume that included “Mariana,” “Claribel,” “The Lotus Eaters,” “The Palace of Art,” “The May Queen,” “Oenone” and “The Two Voices,” a debate on suicide. “Tithonus,” one of Tennyson’s most powerful poems, dates from this period, though it was not published until 1860.
When Hallam died in Vienna in 1833, Tennyson lost not only an intimate friend and collaborator but also a brother, for Hallam was to have married his sister. For nine years he published little. He may have been distressed by a savage notice in the Quarterly Review, which had trodden so heavily on Keats and Shelley before him. But he was also grieving and writing In Memoriam, the best of his long works; and he was courting his future wife and making heavy weather of his finances. Poems (1842) brought him back into the public eye. It included early work but also “Locksley Hall,” “Ulysses,” “Morte d’Arthur”—the prototype for Idylls of the King—and other important work. In 1847 The Princess: A Medley appeared, memorable for its great lyrics, which include “The splendour falls,” “Tears, idle tears” and “Now sleeps the crimson petal.” The blank verse narrative tide advances on these islands of lyric poetry, but they can be rescued without damage to their integrity.
In 1850 Tennyson received public laurels and fulfilled a private desire. He was married after a courtship whose length reflected not reluctance but lack of money. He published In Memoriam. And he became poet laureate, succeeding Wordsworth. The “Ode on Wellington” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” are masterpieces of laureate art. Few laureates are so transparently sincere, prompt and prosodically competent in the execution of their duties. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” entered the common memory.
Fame came to weigh on him. He moved to Farringford on the Isle of Wight. Maud: A Monodrama (1855) and the first four Idylls of the King (1859) confirmed his hold on the English poetry of the day. Enoch Arden registers the effect of too strong a sense of audience. Hopkins says it is Tennysonian rather than Tennyson. The Representative Voice sounded, and some readers recoiled. Sentimental rendering of a tale with dramatic potential—a tale like one of Crabbe’s—and a failure of subtlety were clear. The volume included “The Northern Farmer, Old Style,” a dialect poem that, beside Barnes’s, merits harsh attention. In 1869 The Holy Grail appeared. The Arthurian romance grew.
More than two decades remained to him. He’d made a second home near Haslemere, Sussex, and from there issued his unhappy verse plays. Shakespeare provided his model, but Tennyson was a poet of lyrical reflection; his narrative skill was slight, his dramatic talents slighter. Nowhere are his limits clearer than in Maud. Madness here is mere rant in comparison with Lear’s wild wisdom. Lear’s language breaks and resolves in connotative and accidental combinations (controlled remotely by the wider imaginative logic of the play). His madness is dramatically integrated because it is syntactically and semantically disintegrated. In Maud, the poet raves in long lines that are dramatically unconvincing because too lucid: not a condition of mind but a state of feeling, or a statement about feelings, a passion against social and other ills. It is not the character who speaks—or if he speaks, it is not in character. The poetry is powerful, but the monologue form fails the poet.
During his years of dramatic enterprise he published Ballads and Other Poems (1880). Tiresias, and Other Poems (1885) salvaged some old and added new work. Demeter, and Other Poems (1889) included “Crossing the Bar.” The Death of Oenone coincided with his own in 1892.
Even excluding the plays, it is a vast body of work: poems of feeling and of sentiment, poems of thought and of received opinion. When Browning acquired an audience, he turned garrulous. Tennyson turned sententious. But the Representative Voice does not merely entertain doubts, he actually feels them; his politics, like his religion, are rooted in memory of the past and fear of the future. A liberal, he distrusts progressivism even as he acknowledges the injustices and evils that make it necessary. Tennyson is an intellectual enigma, which is why many take him to be a philosopher speaking for their own indecision and doubt.
Arnold knew better, writing to his mother in 1860: “The real truth is that Tennyson, with all his temperament and artistic skill, is deficient in intellectual power; and no modern poet can make very much of his business unless he is pre-eminently strong in this.” Arnold, right in his analysis, is wrong in his conclusion. Had Tennyson possessed “intellectual power” or a real “philosophy,” he would hardly have improved his best lyrics, though he might have avoided some fatuities. His poetic weakness is not intellectual: it is narrowness of register. He tries every genre, masters a number of verse forms, but whole registers of language are inaccessible to him. When he tries consciously to elude his refining style, he turns out poems such as “Dora,” arch and affected, talking down, quite unlike Wordsworth’s voice in similar circumstances. Or he adopts dialect, without conviction or authority.
Tennyson’s poetic vices stem from an ignorance of the limits of his talent, leading him to undertake vast poetic expeditions kitted out with the wrong equipment. He maintains, even in dull poems, prosodic interest. His instinct for appropriate rhythm is unmatched among the Victorians. And it is an instinct. But a passion for open vowels can grow monotonous, an aspect of his mimetic theory of language. He believes sound and syntax can create equivalents to motion and image. In “The Palace of Art” he draws syntactical portraits. “The Lotus Eaters” is a mimetic exercise. He’s said to have regarded “The mellow lin-lan-lun of evening bells” as his best line. He was keener at the start to shape a language adequate for experience and image than to create a vehicle suitable for ideas. He often salvages lines from forgotten poems and plugs them into new contexts. Such lines come from the past and have special virtue. The past is a place of certitude. Early in his career he begins constructing Camelot and never substantially improves—in the whole of the Idylls—on “The Lady of Shalott” and “Morte d’Arthur,” despite the slow eloquence of “The Passing of Arthur.” His Arthurian world is a dream place that nurtures lyrics, where “The Lady of Shalott” loses romantic innocence. As a background for action and heroic narrative it is too brittle and brightly painted to contain large figures without a degree of ironic adjustment and lightness, and Tennyson was not an ironist.
He has another past to call on, a stratum of myth and legend of more intimate concern from which he retrieves two great poems, “Ulysses” and “Tithonus.” Out of these characters he coaxes complete monologues: they answer to his voice. “Ulysses” was composed shortly after Hallam’s death. The young Tennyson assumes a mask of age, in tune with the character and its inaction. Ulysses’ Ithacan landscape is also a state of mind, the detail symbolic. The speaker forces value from the very sense of partiality and fragmentation: the past indeterminate and lost, recalled in shards of memory; the future unknowable. This condition generally leads Tennyson to compose lyrics of despair. But Ulysses pilots him toward an unsurrendering hope: isolated, separated from his subjects (hoarders, feeders, sleepers) who “know not me,” far from old comrades, from youth. “I am become a name.”
The poem proves psychologically plausible because of the inconsistencies in Ulysses’ reflections, his glossing over of motive. His son Telemachus will “make mild / A rugged people, and through soft degrees / Subdue them to the useful and the good.” He projects upon his son unproven qualities of leadership and transfers to him a responsibility he has no stomach for. He wants knowledge and adventure—elsewhere, not in the present but through the past, to re-meet his peers. The mask of age is revitalized by a force from youth, driving him to-ward a receding horizon: the hero’s and the artist’s undying quest. Arthur Hallam encouraged in life and inspired in death the indirect, condensed and evocative style of “Ulysses.” One is tempted to call the mode symbolist.
Hallam’s death inspired In Memoriam, A.H.A., a sequence of elegies in taut quatrains with cyclic a-b-b-a rhymes, simple and expressive in the redistribution of conventional rhyme emphases. The debt to the Greek poets, to Horace and to other classic writers, is clear in the images and conventions such as the garden of Adonis. The suppressed sensual—even sexual—feeling has a strange potency. There are phrasal echoes of the full-fleshed classical elegies. Those models helped him imbue personal loss—physical, emotional and spiritual—with universal reference. The widowed Queen Victoria took solace from the poem; it was read by soldiers and widows as though written out of their own grief. In the sixth elegy he writes, “Never morning wore / To evening but some heart did break.” He invites readers to attach their own grief to his. With Virgilian tact he touches the deep sentiment of the age: helpless sadness of loss, fear of a shrouded future, a generalized guilt and religious doubt. The poem enacts a “ritual of recovery”—moving from despair by stages not to happiness but to a wan wisdom, metaphysical rebirth, a meeting beyond the grave, “soul in soul.”
The plot is mere chronology: a cycle of seasons which first counter-point and later corroborate the feelings of the poem. Easter and Christ-mas have an evolving significance. Dream, memory and desire are checked and at last controlled by duty, dogma and moral steadfastness. Tennyson called In Memoriam, with its steady ascent from the depths, a “Divine Comedy.” He struggles free of grief first by way of personification. “Sorrow” becomes a figure, then “Love” and “Faith” detach themselves. Thus, ideas divide from feelings, they gain force and at last ascendancy, until Tennyson can write, “ ’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.” Religion finds a toehold and helps in the recovery. But T. S. Eliot points out that “it is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt.” Tennyson acknowledges as much: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds.” He illustrates it, too:
...but what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but the cry.
Or the totally unknowing, more haunting, “What hope of answer or redress? / Behind the veil, behind the veil.” There is a plain language of despair as well: “On the bald street breaks the blank day”; and “A weight of nerves without a mind.” The use of religious images may be distasteful, as in “They call me in the public squares / The fool that wears a crown of thorns,” or in the identification of Hallam with Christ and his elevation to the status of Victorian hero (a parallel between Carlyle and Tennyson is often drawn), but religious metamorphosis is necessary to the theme.
Tennyson spoke to and for his age in In Memoriam. Its success as a long poem depends on its fragmentariness. The sections are elegiac idylls, assembled into a sequence. Like Maud, the sequence hangs together thanks to what Eliot called “the greatest lyrical resourcefulness that a poet has ever shown.” Elegies and poems of aftermath were Tennyson’s forte. He was a gray beard from the beginning.
The idyll, a brief poem that describes an idealized incident or scene, suited him well in “Ulysses” and “Tithonus.” The Idylls of the King, despite—or because of—the labors Tennyson expended on them, fail. They are not idylls in the generic sense but static chunks of Arthurian epic, large and a bit vulgar, like those Victorian paintings that glitter with thick paint and seem to reflect the light rather than reveal themselves. The verse emerged at low pressure, with deadly deliberation and calculation and none of the urgency that lends Maud and In Memoriam a compelling readability, a sense of discovery.
Among his juvenilia is a poem called “Song” (“A spirit haunts”), which contains in miniature many of the qualities Tennyson later perfected. Keats may have touched the young poet but he has been assimilated into Tennyson’s style: formally complex, vivid in image and mimetic in language, answering at once to an actual scene and to a subjective mood. The words evoke and enact in a single process:
The air is damp, and hushed, and close,
As a sick man’s room when he taketh repose
An hour before death;
My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves,
And the breath
Of the fading edges of box beneath,
And the year’s last rose.
Heavily hangs the broad sunflower
Over its grave i’ the earth so chilly;
Heavily hangs the hollyhock,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily.
In 1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson persuaded his American publisher to issue a volume of Tennyson’s poems, but the publisher reneged. The American and the English writer met in 1848, when Tennyson, returning from Killarney in Ireland, stayed at Coventry Patmore’s house, where Emerson was visiting on his way to France. Tennyson was rather anti-American, owing in part to the fact that British writers were mercilessly pirated in the United States. Emerson, on the first night, found Tennyson “cultivated, quite unaffected” and lively in recounting tales of his Irish journey. He had “the air of one who is accustomed to be petted and indulged by those he lives with.” It was suggested that Tennyson might accompany Emerson to France, but Tennyson wanted to go to Italy. When Emerson visited him in London in his lodgings, he came away disappointed by the poet he had so staunchly advocated a decade before.
Just as Tennyson at the time was the Big Name in British poetry, so Emerson was the giant among American writers, the first to be successfully exported, the first with an enormous European reputation. Emerson the poet is altogether smaller and less compelling than Emerson the thinker, preacher and writer. Yet he was a poet and he wrote, in those large ambiguous sentences that mean all things to all (liberal) men, essays that opened America to American poets.
The poems did not find favor with English critics. Arnold, lecturing in America and not ingratiating himself with his audience, remembers how Milton said poetry should be simple, sensuous, or impassioned. “Well, Emerson’s poetry is seldom either simple, or sensuous or impassioned. In general it lacks directness; it lacks concreteness; it lacks energy.” The grammar is “often embarrassed.” He is poor even in single lines, though Arnold quotes those lines and brief passages with amazement. Emerson’s Essays, on the other hand, are for Arnold as central to the prose of his day as Wordsworth’s verse to the poetry. Yet—and his verdict is on the Essays—“He cannot build; his arrangement of philosophical ideas has no progress in it, no evolution; he does not construct a philosophy.” Readers who first catch their breath at Emerson’s astounding sentences eventually stifle a yawn: they are vertical rather than horizontal, each standing upright and refusing to bend into the next sequentially, to make a circuit, to make a path for reason.
Born in Boston in 1803, Emerson was a cradle Unitarian (his father was a liberal Unitarian pastor), and himself became a pastor in 1829, eight years after he graduated from Harvard. His father died when he was a boy, but a Calvinist aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, steered his attention to Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton and to Burke, and, despite their differences, he revered her and learned from her a candid straightforwardness.
What he lacked then, and for all his days, was—as William Butler Yeats observed of him, Thoreau and Whitman—the sense of evil that was so real for Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. “Put in something about the Supernal Oneness,” said Edgar Allan Poe sardonically; “Don’t say a syllable about the Infernal Twoness.” There was bad and there was good, but evil? It was an outmoded category; his temperament could never make much of it, even when he lost his young wife, abandoned the pulpit and went to Europe for the first time to reflect on his future. He met Landor, Carlyle and Coleridge—whom he promoted in America on his return, since Coleridge had helped him to discriminate between the logical and the intuitive routes to truth—and was encouraged to study the German idealist philosophers. Whole areas of human experience elude him, and from the vantage point of a later century his benign, generous optimism looks almost like willful sentimentality. He is a learned prophet of dawn, not of night and nightmare, providing a no longer plausible resource except in his tolerance. Even that has been stigmatized as mere passivity: “Active passivity” was his retort.
Bryant had a take on nature that Emerson took much further: “The whole of nature is a metaphor of the mind.” In such a vastly digestive statement resides the solipsism of Emerson at his most rapt. In his attacks on orthodoxy, his insistence on inherent understanding, he broke the colonial mold and became a figure of controversy. Or he seemed to break the mold. Poe adds, “Above all, study innuendo. Hint everything—assert nothing.” Eastern religious forms had found out Emerson and liberated him from specific meaning.
He had moved to Concord, Massachusetts, and produced at the Old Manse the essays that gave shape to a new American identity. He established himself as a philosopher, lecturer and essayist at the heart of the Transcendentalist community, a revolutionary group in the area of civic reform. This was all very well except that it did not provide an adequate base for poetic imagination. The poet was a seer, with access to the oversoul via nature. It was not so much his willful ideas about the poet but his more general reflections on the art of poetry, his advocacy of new and open forms, and his endorsement of Whitman that set him at the heart of the new poetry. He lived almost as long as Barnes, dying in 1882.
The poems require a suspension of prosodic expectation. They seldom sing, and when they do it is in small bursts. We are expected to engage with their meanings. A poem, for Emerson, is a more condensed and allusive form of essay, or an illustration.
“Pass in, pass in,” the angels say,
“In to the upper doors,
Nor count compartments of the floors,
But mount to paradise
By the stairway of surprise.”
“The stairway of surprise” is a little miracle, but no wonder Arnold had trouble with the grammar: What are the second and third lines doing, exactly? Are the angels, is the poet, garbled?
In his belief that line lengths and rhythms, and phrases, are determined by breath—an organic connection between the poem and the poet—he foreshadows the theories of Charles Olson a century later. But his physiology and Olson’s are different in kind: Emerson’s body is curiously disembodied, missing or suppressing certain vital bits. Yet when we get to his “Ode: Inscribed to W. H. Channing,” we can forgive him much in the light of the first few lines, which are so open, so American: a new note of utter freshness, as brilliant and convincing as those first demotic runs of John Skelton’s were, Skelton’s harbingers of a new beginning:
The God who made new Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men;—
Small blat and wren
House in the oak:—
If earth-fire cleave
The upheaved land, and bury the folk,
The southern crocodile would grieve.
Virtue palters: Right is hence;
Freedom praised, but hid;
Funeral eloquence
Rattles the coffin-lid.
It is not fanciful to hear in this not only some of the taut, phrasal qualities of Emily Dickinson but, more especially, the strange portioning out of sense that we get in Marianne Moore’s “What are Years?” All Emerson had to do was to abandon meter, not for the long cadences of Whitman but for short, intense phrases, for his beloved abstractions married to concrete images. What the English Augustan poets had done, merging moral and physical categories, he could do, when the spirit (or oversoul) moved him, with philosophical ideas and the actual creatures and objects of his world. Not a new world any longer, but the possibility of a new poetry. Leaves of Grass, “The Raven” and Miss Dickinson are just around the corner, each awaited by a different kind of cruel neglect.