Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" About "The American Scholar"

Originally titled "An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, [Massachusetts,] August 31, 1837," Emerson delivered what is now referred to as "The American Scholar" essay as a speech to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society, an honorary society of male college students with unusually high grade point averages. At the time, women were barred from higher education, and scholarship was reserved exclusively for men. Emerson published the speech under its original title as a pamphlet later that same year and republished it in 1838. In 1841, he included the essay in his book Essays, but changed its title to "The American Scholar" to enlarge his audience to all college students, as well as other individuals interested in American letters. Placed in his Man Thinking: An Oration (1841), the essay found its final home in Nature; Addresses, and Lectures (1849

The text begins with an introduction (paragraphs 1-7) in which Emerson explains that his intent is to explore the scholar as one function of the whole human being: The scholar is "Man Thinking." The remainder of the essay is organized into four sections, the first three discussing the influence of nature (paragraphs 8 and 9), the influence of the past and books (paragraphs 10-20), and the influence of action (paragraphs 21-30) on the education of the thinking man. In the last section (paragraphs 31-45), Emerson considers the duties of the scholar and then discusses his views of America in his own time.

Readers should number each paragraph in pencil as these Notes make reference to individual paragraphs in the essay.

Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Paragraphs 1-7 - "Man Thinking"

Emerson opens "The American Scholar" with greetings to the college president and members of the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College. Pointing out the differences between this gathering and the athletic and dramatic contests of ancient Greece, the poetry contests of the Middle Ages, and the scientific academies of nineteenth-century Europe, he voices a theme that draws the entire essay together: the notion of an independent American intelligentsia that will no longer depend for authority on its European past. He sounds what one critic contends is "the first clarion of an American literary renaissance," a call for Americans to seek their creative inspirations using America as their source, much like Walt Whitman would do in Leaves of Grass eighteen years later. In the second paragraph, Emerson announces his theme as "The American Scholar" not a particular individual but an abstract ideal

The remaining five paragraphs relate an allegory that underlies the discussion to follow. According to an ancient fable, there was once only "One Man," who then was divided into many men so that society could work more efficiently. Ideally, society labors together — each person doing his or her task — so that it can function properly. However, society has now subdivided to so great an extent that it no longer serves the good of its citizens. And the scholar, being a part of society, has degenerated also. Formerly a "Man Thinking," the scholar is now "a mere thinker," a problem that Emerson hopes to correct successfully by re-familiarizing his audience with how the true scholar is educated and what the duties of this scholar are

Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Paragraphs 8-9 - The Influence of Nature

In these two paragraphs comprising the first section on how a scholar should be educated, Emerson envisions nature as a teacher that instructs individuals who observe the natural world to see — eventually — how similar their minds and nature are. The first similarity he discusses concerns the notion of circular power — a theme familiar to readers of the Nature essay — found in nature and in the scholar's spirit. Both nature and the scholar's spirit, "whose beginning, whose ending he never can find — so entire, so boundless," are eternal

Order is another similarity — as it is in Nature — between the scholar and nature. At first, the mind views a chaotic and infinite reality of individual facts, but then it begins to classify these facts into categories, to make comparisons and distinctions. A person

discovers nature's laws and can understand them because they are similar to the operations of the intellect. Eventually, we realize that nature and the soul — both proceeding from what Emerson terms "one root" — are parallel structures that mirror each other (Emerson's term for "parallel" may be misleading; he says that nature is the "opposite" of the soul). So, a greater knowledge of nature results in a greater understanding of the self, and vice versa. The maxims "Know thyself" and "Study nature" are equivalent: They are two ways of saying the same thing

Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Paragraphs 10-20 - The Influence of the Past

Emerson devotes much of his discussion to the second influence on the mind, past learning — or, as he expresses it, the influence of books. In the first three paragraphs of this section, he emphasizes that books contain the learning of the past; however, he also says that these books pose a great danger. While it is true that books transform mere facts ("short-lived actions") into vital truths ("immortal thoughts"), every book is inevitably a partial truth, biased by society's standards when it was written. Each age must create its own books and find its own truths for itself

Following this call for each age's creating truth, Emerson dwells on other dangers in books. They are dangerous, he says, because they tempt the scholar away from original thought. Excessive respect for the brilliance of past thinkers can discourage us from exploring new ideas and seeking individualized truths.

The worst example of slavish deference to past thinkers is the bookworm, a pedant who focuses all thought on trivial matters of scholarship and ignores large, universal ideas. This type of person becomes passive and uncreative, and is the antithesis of Emerson's ideal of the creative imagination: "Man hopes. Genius creates. To create, — to create, — is the proof of a divine presence." The non-creative bookworm is more spiritually distanced from God — and, therefore, from nature — than is the thinker of original thoughts.

But the genius, too, can suffer from the undue influence of books. Emerson's example of this kind of sufferer are the English dramatic poets, who, he says, have been "Shakespearized" for two hundred years: Rather than producing new, original texts and thoughts, they mimic Shakespeare's writings. Citing an Arabic proverb that says that one fig tree fertilizes another — just like one author can inspire another — Emerson suggests that true scholars should resort to books only when their own creative genius dries up or is blocked.

The last three paragraphs of this section refer to the pleasures and benefits of reading, provided it is done correctly. There is a unique pleasure in reading. Because ancient authors thought and felt as people do today, books defeat time, a phenomenon that Emerson argues is evidence of the transcendental oneness of human minds. Qualifying his previous insistence on individual creation, he says that he never underestimates the written word: Great thinkers are nourished by any knowledge, even that in books, although it takes a remarkably independent mind to read critically at all times. This kind of reading mines the essential vein of truth in an author while discarding the trivial or biased.

Emerson concedes that there are certain kinds of reading that are essential to an educated person: History, science, and similar subjects, which must be acquired by laborious reading and study. Foremost, schools must foster creativity rather than rely on rote memorization of texts: ". . . [schools] can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create

Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Paragraphs 21-30 - The Influence of Action

In this third section, Emerson comments on the scholar's need for action, for physical labor. He rejects the notion that the scholar should not engage in practical action. Action, while secondary to thought, is still necessary: "Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential." Furthermore, not to act — declining to put principle into practice — is cowardly. The transcendental concept of the world as an expression of ourselves makes action the natural duty of a thinking person

Emerson observes the difference between recent actions and past actions. Over time, he says, a person's past deeds are transformed into thought, but recent acts are too entangled with present feelings to undergo this

transformation. He compares "the recent act" to an insect larva, which eventually metamorphoses into a butterfly — symbolic of action becoming thought.

Finally, he praises labor as valuable in and of itself, for such action is the material creatively used by the scholar. An active person has a richer existence than a scholar who merely undergoes a second-hand existence through the words and thoughts of others. The ideal life has "undulation" — a rhythm that balances, or alternates, thought and action, labor and contemplation: "A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think." This cycle creates a person's character that is far superior to the fame or the honor too easily expected by a mere display of higher learning

Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Paragraphs 31-45 - The Scholar's Duties

After Emerson has discussed how nature, books, and action educate the scholar, he now addresses the scholar's obligations to society. First, he considers these obligations in general, abstract terms; then he relates them to the particular situation of the American scholar

The scholar's first and most important duty is to develop unflinching self-trust and a mind that will be a repository of wisdom for other people. This is a difficult task, Emerson says, because the scholar must endure poverty, hardship, tedium, solitude, and other privations while following the path of knowledge. Self-sacrifice is often called for, as demonstrated in Emerson's examples of two astronomers who spent many hours in tedious and solitary observation of space in order to make discoveries that benefited mankind. Many readers will wonder just how satisfying the reward really is when Emerson acknowledges that the scholar "is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature."

The true scholar is dedicated to preserving the wisdom of the past and is obligated to communicating the noblest thoughts and feelings to the public. This last duty means that the scholar — "who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public illustrious thoughts" — must always remain independent in thinking and judgment, regardless of popular opinion, fad, notoriety, or expediency. Because the scholar discovers universal ideas, those held by the universal human mind, he can communicate with people of all classes and ages: "He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart."

Although he appears to lead a reclusive and benign life, the scholar must be brave because he deals in ideas, a dangerous currency. Self-trust is the source of courage and can be traced to the transcendental conviction that the true thinker sees all thought as one; universal truth is present in all people, although not all people are aware of it. Instead of thinking individually, we live vicariously through our heroes; we seek self-worth through others when we should search for it in ourselves. The noblest ambition is to improve human nature by fulfilling our individual natures.

Emerson concludes the essay by observing that different ages in Western civilization, which he terms the Classic, the Romantic, and the Reflective (or the

Philosophical) periods, have been characterized by different dominant ideas, and he acknowledges that he has neglected speaking about the importance of differences between ages while speaking perhaps too fervently about the transcendental unity of all human thought.

Emerson now proposes an evolutionary development of civilization, comparable to the development of a person from childhood to adulthood. The present age — the first half of the 1800s — is an age of criticism, especially self-criticism. Although some people find such criticism to be an inferior philosophy, Emerson believes that it is valid and important. Initiating a series of questions, he asks whether discontent with the quality of current thought and literature is such a bad thing; he answers that it is not. Dissatisfaction, he says, marks a transitional period of growth and evolution into new knowledge: "If there is any period one would desire to be born in,is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; . . . This [present] time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."

Emerson applauds the views of English and German romantic poets like Wordsworth and Goethe, who find inspiration and nobility in the lives and work of common people. Instead of regarding only royal and aristocratic subjects as appropriate for great and philosophical literature, the Romantic writers reveal the poetry and sublimity in the lives of lower-class and working people. Their writing is full of life and vitality, and it exemplifies the transcendental doctrine of the unity of all people. Ironically, we should remember that at the beginning of the essay, Emerson advocated Americans' throwing off the European mantle that cloaks their own culture. Here, he distinguishes between a European tradition that celebrates the lives of common people, and one that celebrates only the monarchical rule of nations: "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe."

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Making special reference to the Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, Emerson contends that although Swedenborg has not received his due recognition, he revealed the essential connection between the human mind and the natural world, the fundamental oneness of humans and nature. Emerson finds much inspiration for his own thinking and writing in the doctrines of Swedenborg.

In his long, concluding paragraph, Emerson dwells on the romantic ideal of the individual. This fundamentally American concept, which he develops at much greater length in the essay "Self-Reliance," is America's major contribution to the world of ideas. The scholar must be independent, courageous, and original; in thinking and acting, the scholar must demonstrate that America is not the timid society it is assumed to be. We must refuse to be mere purveyors of the past's wisdom: ". . . this confidence in the unsearched might of man, belongs by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar," who will create a native, truly American culture

Summary and Analysis of "The American Scholar" Glossary

Troubadours A class of lyric poets and poet-musicians, they lived in southern France in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries and composed poems of love and chivalry

sere Withered.

constellation Harp another name for Lyra, a constellation of stars in the northern hemisphere; it contains Vega, the fourth brightest star in the heavens.

monitory A warning.

refractory Unruly.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106-43 B.C.) A Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher, he is best known for his speech making.

Locke, John (1632-1704) An English philosopher, Locke developed a theory of cognition that denied the existence of innate ideas and asserted that all thought is based on our senses. His works influenced American Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, who modified Puritan doctrine to allow for more play of reason and intellect, building a foundation for Unitarianism and, eventually, transcendentalism.

Bacon, Francis (1561-1626) An English essayist, statesman, and philosopher, he proposed a theory called the inductive method, a scientific knowledge based on observation and experiment.

Third Estate The "common people" under the French monarchy; the clergy and nobles formed the first two estates.

emendators Those who make textual corrections.

efflux To flow outwardly.

fig tree A Mediterranean tree or shrub, widely cultivated for its edible fruit.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (d. 1400) The English poet who wrote The Canterbury Tales.

Marvell, Andrew (1621-78) An English metaphysical poet, his works include "To His Coy Mistress" and "Damon the Mower."

Dryden, John (1631-1700) English poet, dramatist, and essayist.

Plato (c. 427-347 B.C.) A Greek philosopher, he formulated the philosophy of idealism, which holds that the concepts or ideas of things are more perfect — and, therefore, more real — than the material things themselves.

elements Here, the basic principles of a subject.

pecuniary Of, or involving, money.

valetudinarian A person in poor health, or one who is constantly anxious about his or her state of health.

empyrean The highest reaches of heaven; paradise.

ferules Sticks used for punishing children.

Savoyards Inhabitants of Savoy, now a province of southeast France; during Emerson's lifetime, Savoyards were renowned for their woodcarving.

Algiers The capital of Algeria, a country in northwest Africa, on the Mediterranean Sea.

copestones Meaning capstone, the top stone of a wall.

Newton, Sir Isaac (1642-1727) An English mathematician and scientist, Newton is chiefly remembered for formulating the law of gravity.

unhandselled Unappreciated.

Druids Prehistoric Celtic priests.

Berserkirs Savage warriors of Norse mythology.

Alfred (d. 899) Alfred was the king (871-99) of what was then called West Saxony, in southwest England.

Flamsteed, John (1646-1719) English astronomer.

Herschel, Sir William (1738-1822) An English astronomer, he is credited for discovering Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun.

glazed Having a roof of glass.

promulgate To make known publicly.

fetish An obsessive preoccupation.

ephemeral Short-lived; transitory.

presentiment A feeling that something is about to occur.

firmament The expanse of the heavens; the sky; poetically, a symbol of strength.

signet A small seal pressed into a hot wax wafer in order to make a document official.

Macdonald Emerson substitutes this typical name of a Scottish chief in the old proverb, "Where Macgregor sits, there is the head of the table."

Linnaeus, Carolus (1707-78) The Swedish botanist who founded the modern classification system for plants and animals known as binomial nomenclature.

Davy, Sir Humphry (1778-1829) English chemist.

Cuvier, Georges (1769-1832) A French naturalist, he is considered to be the founder of comparative anatomy.

Provencal Minstrelsy Provence, an ancient province in southeast France, was a center for troubadours.

lumber room A room cluttered with discarded household articles and furniture.

Goldsmith, Oliver (d. 1774) English poet, playwright, and novelist.

Burns, Robert (1759-96) The Scottish poet who wrote "Tam o'Shanter" and "Auld Lang Syne."

Cowper, William (1731-1800) The English poet whose major work is The Task.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832) A German writer, he profoundly influenced literary romanticism; he is noted for his two-part dramatic poem Faust, published in 1808 and 1832.

Wordsworth, William (1770-1850) An English poet, his most important collection, Lyrical Ballads (1798), helped establish romanticism in England.

Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881) English historian, philosopher, and essayist.

Pope, Alexander (1688-1744) English poet and translator.

Johnson, Samuel (1709-84) The English writer and critic who wrote Lives of the Poets, a study of English poetry.

Gibbon, Edward (1737-94) Considered to be one of the greatest English historians, Gibbon authored the six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688-1772) A Swedish scientist, mystic, philosopher, and theologian, Swedenborg insisted that the scriptures are the immediate word of God. He postulated many scientific theories that were far ahead of their time, including the idea that all matter is made up of tiny swirling particles (later called atoms). He also set out to prove the existence of an immortal soul. Theologically, he asserted that the heavenly trinity is reproduced in human beings as soul, body, and mind. His teachings became the nucleus of the Church of the New Jerusalem.

Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich (1746-1827) Swiss educator

Emerson's The American Scholar - Mere Thinkers and Men Thinking

In his speech, "The American Scholar," Emerson expresses his distaste for the "mere thinkers" who obtain their ideas from the

work of other men. These other men, called "Men Thinking," are the ones who truly deserve credit because they derive their

ideas from nature and the world. A truly unique idea is often one that is stumbled upon by a man while he is alone, with no

distractions or outside sources to draw information from. He simply takes his knowledge of the world and draws it together, as

described by Emerson: "To the young mind everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things

and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on

tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground whereby contrary and remote things

cohere and flower out from one stem." Nature allows man the freedom to tie together his knowledge and create his own ideas.

Ideas that are truly new are ones that are discovered in this way by "Men Thinking", because ideas of mere thinkers are

prompted by literature containing old ideas. Mere thinkers are the bookworms who spend their days studying the philosophies

of thinkers, learning from them, but not creating their own ideas. Emerson writes that books are written by "Men of talent, that

is who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles." He believes that these men,

although intelligent, have been heavily influenced by other people, and therefore have biased opinions which have not come

directly from their own minds. Mere thinkers combine theologies from various sources, but have little that they can consider to

be their own private thought.

Emerson's reasoning, although it seems logical, has a paradoxical flaw in it. Although he his advocating pure thought, by writing

down his thoughts, he is helping to contribute to the massive amounts of mere thinkers who will hear his ideas and be

influenced by them. Emerson writes that "The sacredness which attaches to the art of creation, the act of thought, is transferred

to the record." He gives the impression that he wants to keep creative thoughts sacred by not writing them down and making

them available to others. Yet at the exact same time as he is describing this phenomenon, he is doing exactly what he is opposed

to. Although he mentions later that the one good purpose books serve is to inspire, his work has done much more than simply

inspiring people. He has become one of the great thinkers who people study; a more modern Cicero, Locke, or Bacon. His work

has contributed more to the increase in population of mere thinkers than it has to the increase of "Man Thinking" because he is

defying his own principle

STRUCTURE AND THEMES Emerson begins his address with a polite nod to the tradition of such talks on the role and especially the future of learning and the arts in America, but he quickly separates himself from the traditional celebratory and jingoistic tone of such performances. He does not praise American cultural productions but instead wishes that the "sluggard intellect of this continent" would awake and produce "something better than the exertions of mechanical skill," a clear jibe at the anti-intellectualism and the practical, materialistic bent of American life (p. 81). Then, as he typically does at the beginning of his essays, Emerson attempts to ground his discourse in an appeal to common experience, in this case the sense of incompleteness and isolation that follows upon the specialization of roles in society. He recounts the fable that "the gods, in the beginning, divided man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself." "The fable implies," Emerson goes on, "that the individual to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed in multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered." What we have then, in "the divided or social state," is a condition in which "Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things," but is nowhere complete (pp. 82, 83).

In this scheme the ideal of "Man Thinking," that is, the intellectual and creative facets of the individual self, are wrongly delegated to the scholar. But it is worth noting that this fable and Emerson's interpretation of it also link up to the economic developments of the age and in particular to the financial crisis brought on by the panic of 1837. Emerson describes here a kind of transcendental version of what Karl Marx, a few years later in Europe, would call the alienation of labor, the dis-ease brought on by industrialization and specialization, where the

worker has no sense of a whole task or a whole product completed because he is relegated to some partial and repetitive function within a large-scale industrial operation. Emerson is not finally concerned with such a materialist economic analysis, but he is responding with some urgency, as so many writers did, to the increasingly complex, urban, and industrial drift of nineteenth-century society.

After this introduction, the first half of the essay is devoted to an elaboration of the principal formative influences on the scholar's development. Still influenced by his preacherly habit of numbering the points of his discourse, Emerson divides this section of the essay with roman numerals to signal the three major influences: nature, books (or what Emerson calls "the mind of the Past"), and action. What is noteworthy about this list, of course, is the demotion of books and formal learning to a secondary position in the hierarchy of influences. Or, conversely, the elevation of nature to the primary position. Of course, those familiar with Emerson's little book Nature would not be surprised. And the sense in which Emerson thinks of nature as a teacher to the potential scholar, "this school-boy under the bending dome of day" (p. 86), corresponds to the uses of natureommodity, beauty, language, and disciplines he enumerates and describes them in Nature. Particularly he has in mind the last of these uses, "discipline," by which he means something like "teaching": nature teaches us through its immense richness and variety and invites us to probe and fathom its complexity through our lower intellectual faculty, the Understanding. But nature also appeals to our higher faculty, the Reason, to intuit underlying truths and the divine laws that animate all creation. Referring to the process of sealing an envelope with a wax seal imprinted on the paper, Emerson employs one of his most resonant metaphors to describe the relation between nature and the mind or spirit that brings it forth: "He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print." And thus, as he concludes, "the ancient precept, 'Know thyself,' and the modern precept, 'study nature,' become at last one maxim" (pp. 86, 87).

The next section of Emerson's discourse takes up the education of the scholar by books ("the mind of the Past"), in what must have been to his auditors the most surprising if not the most perverse part of his address. Not only is this traditional mainstay of education relegated to second place, as it were, but book learning also undergoes further disparagement. The problem of the book, for Emerson, is the same problem that attaches to any doctrine or form; it supplants the original thought or spirit that created it: "The sacredness which attaches to the

act of creation,he act of thought,s instantly transferred to the record. . . . Instantly, the book becomes noxious. The guide is a tyrant" (pp. 889). Books thus become a bar to original thought, and traditional education becomes an exercise in imitation. The right use, indeed the only legitimate use of books is to inspire, to prompt us to think originally or, as Emerson phrases it more boldly, to "read God directly" (p. 91). If this last notion made some in the audience uneasy, as verging on heresy, it would get worse, for Emerson would return to Harvard the following year and, in his speech to the divinity school students, employ this same critique of the book to attack orthodox Christianity and its reliance on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Lest one think, on the basis of this principle, that one can simply do without books or formal education, Emerson ends this section with an important caveat that puts us all back in the classroom: "Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading." Yet even here, in getting back to basics, Emerson has a dig for Harvard: speaking of colleges, he says, "they can only serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create" (p. 93). Because the traditional Harvard pedagogy involved endless numbing recitations sections, his implication is clear.

The third influence on the scholar's development is action, and by his emphasis on this requirement Emerson seeks to counter the stereotype, especially common in nineteenth-century America, that intellectuals reside in ivory towers and shirk the rough-and-tumble of ordinary life and work. The ground for the scholar's action is the same principle that Emerson announces in the "Nature" section of the essay: nature and the world correspond to the self and provide the tangible means to both self-knowledge and productive action: "The world,his shadow of the soul or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I launch eagerly into this resounding tumult" (p. 95). Besides, thought and action participate in what Emerson calls "That great principle of Undulation" or Polarity, by which apparently opposite qualities actually depend upon one another and call one another into being. This principle is "ingrained in every atom" and partakes of the overarching polarity of Power and Form in life, as Emerson would sketch it in "Experience" a few years later (p. 98).

The education of the scholar completed, it remains for Emerson to sketch his duties and to address the larger issue of how to solve the problem of Americans' long-standing sense of cultural inferiority with respect to Europe. His duties are rather easily dispensed with; they are conveyed in a sort of pep talk that Emerson addresses to the audience (and to himself) out of his own experience and hopes for his fledgling career as public intellectual. Though the scholar is liable to suffer disdain, poverty, and solitude in keeping on the right track, eventually he emerges as a hero:

He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart in all emergencies, in all solemn hours has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions,hese he shall receive and impart. (Pp. 10102)

The concluding section of the essay is devoted to an anatomy of the power that the American scholar will need to draw upon to produce this transformative effect on culture. This power comes from a simple yet profound shift in how culture itself is defined and conceived: "This

revolution," Emerson says, "is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man" (p. 107). In thus locating the source of culture within the individual radical "domestication" if ever there was onemerson disposes of the principal negative condition that had stood in the way of America's cultural independence and maturity. Suddenly, instead of looking to Europe we could simply look within. The embarrassing disparity between the long history of European cultural production and the paucity of the same in the United States could be transcended or rendered moot by the realization that Culture with a capital "C" did not consist of the monuments and artifacts stored in museums or libraries but in the potential for self-culture within the individual. This is "domestication" in a double sense: domestic as opposed to foreign, and domestic as pertaining to the individual and the internal as opposed to the public and the external. This subtle but profound shift in the conception of the sources, the expression, and the transmission of high culture is what distinguished Emerson's call for American literary independence from the myriad of such pronouncements that preceded it. This is the foundation of Emerson's claim at the beginning of the essay that "our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close" (p. 81), and his assertion, at the end of the essay, that "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe" (p. 114).

Another sense of this domestication pertains to the subject matter of American art and the artist's treatment of materials. There follows from Emerson's individual basis of culture, which in turn comes from a belief in each person's ability to access the divine and its manifestations in the world, a democratizing and anti-hierarchical turn in the arts. Interestingly Emerson sees this trend as already having happened, not as prospective: "the same movement which effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state, assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and the beautiful, the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized" (p. 110). Thus Emerson does not so much predict the radical democratic practice of Walt Whitman and the realists as look back to English poets of the previous century and early-nineteenth-century Romantics: "this idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, and in a newer time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle" (p. 112). There is no call yet, as there would be a few years later in "The Poet," for poets to sing specifically American songs celebrating the richness and diversity of the United States, and there are no Americans in Emerson's list of literary models. Instead there is a kind of generic invocation of the ordinarythe meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat"one of which has a specifically American valence (p. 111). In fact, that already archaic word "firkin" signals that Emerson is chiefly thinking along pre-existing literary lines, much as his own poetry, for all the radical implications of his theory, remains largely grounded in conventional poetic diction and forms.

Nevertheless, "The American Scholar" gave American intellectuals and would-be writers a firm basis for overcoming their sense of cultural inferiority with respect to Europe and especially England. Neither the immediate prospects for literature nor the materialistic obsessions of contemporary business culture (in which idealistic young people have no choice but to "turn drudges, or die of disgust") were promising, but the long-range outlook, based on nature, self-culture, and a healthy skepticism about received wisdom, was hopeful (p. 114