In July, 1841, Emerson wrote to Carlyle: "My whole
philosophy...teaches acquiescence and optimism." The journals in
this volume, beginning in the summer of 1841, record the spiritual
history of two years that can be viewed as the most critical test
in Emerson's life of his ability to maintain the two aspects of
that philosophy. Early in 1842 his son Waldo died, and the man who
only months before had described himself as "professor of the
joyous Science" found himself once again confronting the full
implications of grief. Seeking to comprehend the loss, he used his
journals to articulate and rediscover the vital faith upon which
his philosophy rested. In passages that went eventually into
"Experience," and in the earliest drafts of the poem "Threnody,"
which appear for the first time in these pages, he discovered that
even this harsh event had its "compensations." Waldo's death forced
a reassessment of the convictions that gave life to his earlier
writings. He transformed his numb responses into his most moving
poetry and prose, giving new and significant meaning to his "old
motto": "I am Defeated all the time, yet to Victory I am born."
Emerson's motto is revealing, for its concepts display aptly the
bipolarity that characterizes so much of his thought during these
crucial years. He carried on at length an internal debate between
the active and passive life styles. He saw his friends committed in
their various ways to a more emphatic practice of their
philosophies than he was able to undertake. Moving between
engagement and withdrawal, commitment and aloofness, action and
passivity, he consistently sought that point of equilibrium where
the opposing forces of his thought could be held in creative
tension. As Emerson's private experience deepened, he was becoming
more completely the public man of letters: writing, publishing,
editing The Dial, and lecturing. His travels brought him in contact
with the leading men of his day, and with sights and exposures
which even his beloved New England could not offer. Amidst the
public duties, however, it was Concord which remained the still,
vital center of his life. A brilliant and widely diversified range
of visitors brought the world to Emerson's home and inspired him to
explore personal and literary issues which he would develop in his
journals and later utilize in lectures and essays. Emerson saw his
calling as that of a poet; these journals are abundant in verse.
Working versions of some of his most noted poems reveal the complex
relationship between his private and literary life and the manner
in which he attempted to fuse the diversities of his thought. In
the eight regular journals and three miscellaneous notebooks of
this volume is the record of these fusions. This period of his life
closes, as it opened, with "acquiescence and optimism." But the
creative skepticism which is so characteristic of the second series
of essays and the poems of 1841-1843 is the mark of a "very real
philosophy," tempered and tried by adversity, by success, and by
"Experience."
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