The pages of these five journals covering the years 1843 to 1847
are filled with Emerson's struggle to formulate the true attitude
of the scholar to the vexing question of public involvement. Pulled
between his belief that a disinterested independence was a
requisite for the writer and the public demands heaped upon him as
a leading intellectual figure, he notes to himself that he
"pounds...tediously" on the "exemption of the writer from all
secular works."
Although Emerson concluded his editorship of "The Dial" in 1844,
he was continually beset by calls for public service, most of which
drew their impetus from the reformist syndrome of the 1840's. In
response to such issues as the Temperance Movement, the utopian
communities, and Henry Thoreau's experiment in self-reliance at
Walden Pond, Emerson exercised sympathetic skepticism and held a
growing conviction that the society of the day was not the lost
cause many of his contemporaries believed it to be.
These journals record Emerson's optimistic attitudes and show
how later they existed side by side with concerns that, under the
impulse of abolition, Texas, and the Mexican War, led him to some
bitter conclusions about the state of the nation. Thoreau's refusal
to pay his poll tax in dem onstration against slavery and the war
particularly horrified him, and he confides in his journal that
Thoreau's action diverted attention from the possibility of real
reform.
The moral ambivalence and cynicism of the day strengthened
Emerson's belief that the self-reliant individual was the only
answer. These individuals--men like Garrison, Phillips, and
Carlyle--were, in Emerson's estimation, destined to set the
standards by whichsociety would be judged. Encouraged by the
prospective publication of his first volume of poetry in 1846,
Emerson also spent much of this period composing verse. Among the
poems in these journals are "Uriel," "Merlin," "Ode to Beauty," and
a section from "Initial, Daemonic, and Celestial Love."
In anticipation of his second visit to Europe, Emerson began
preparing a lecture series on "Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth
Century." In these lectures he would take to the Old World his
observations on the complexities of the times.
General
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