The Shape of a Life: Emerson discovers Goethe

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a preacher at age 29, found himself unable to do his job with an honest heart. He became increasingly conflicted for he felt that the modern reality, his reality, wasn't represented in the religion he purveyed. The church, for him, had become an old man set in his ways, perpetuating dead concepts.
Emerson stepped forward and away. Away from a rigid, confining past and toward nature's vast and mysterious amphitheatre.


It seems as if the present age of words should naturally be followed by an age of silence, when men shall speak only through facts, and so regain their health. We die of words. We are hanged, drawn and quartered by dictionaries. We walk in the vale of shadows. It is an age of hobgobblins...When shall we attain to be real, and be born into the new heaven and earth of nature and truth?


The impetus for Emerson's flight was born out of his research into old world Europe. While in Paris in 1833, he found himself pleasantly disturbed by what he saw inside the Musée d'Histoire naturelle. He choose then and there to become a 'naturalist.' He returned home and enthusiastically threw himself into the realm of natural science. However, he again soon experienced a disheartening, a frustration. Emerson could see from his new vantage point that science was sometimes propelled by sinister motivations, or, at the least, scientists themselves were "becoming obsessed with scientific meaning and losing sight of the real aim of science" (Van Cromphout 24).


She poured a stream of amber over the endless store of private anecdotes, of bosom histories which her wonderful persuasion drew out of all to her. When I heard that a trunk of her correspondence had been found and opened, I felt a panic would strike all her friends, for it was as if a clever reporter had got underneath a confessional and agreed to report all that transpired there in Wall street.

Reluctant to abandon science altogether, and put off by the idea of focussing all his energies on being a poet, Emerson opted to combine the two occupations. For inspiration, he looked to the works of Goethe. Emerson was thrilled by Goethe's emphasis on nature and opposition to mechanized modernity. The combination of science and poetry, for Emerson and most likely Goethe as well, made perfect sense for both men understood nature to be an "open secret" which eluded textbook definitions and could only be properly recounted through poetry (26).


Poet

To clothe the fiery thought
In simple words succeeds,
For still the craft of genius is
To mask a king in weeds.



Works Consulted:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson: a modern anthology. Ed. Alfred Kazin and Daniel Aaron. New York: Dell, 1958.

Van Cromphout, Gustaaf. Emerson's modernity and the example of Goethe. Missouri: U of Missouri, 1990.